Today brought yet another remarkable broadcast interruption—this time into the Saturday morning stream of “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” on the San Francisco Bay Area NPR (National Public Radio) station, KQED.
I’m pretty sure Peter Sagal, host of the weekly radio quiz show, won’t mind me posting this here; fair use laws should allow for this broadcast excerpt. In this case, I was streaming NPR on my Mac laptop with output to the onboard speakers. The interference into the stream began with greater intensity than heard on the recording I started about a minute in, so it took a bit of time for it to make acoustic sense.
The recording was made by activating a simple recording utility on my iPhone and placing the phone next to the laptop. Using a second device to do the recording allows for the capture of the human-audible sound on the built-in speakers in cases where you’re uncertain of how the sound is conveyed to the built-in speakers. I believe there was some repetition, at least at the beginning of the recording, which could be explained by a rogue media server or other middlemanning device transmitting from a close-by residence or across rogue access points deployed by my neighbors as documented in network heat maps like those in Pictures from a mobbing (part 2).
Today, after listening to the interruption for a couple of minutes, I opened the front door and confirmed the sound of a helicopter rotor above. Others in the North Berkeley-Albany area likely heard the helicopter. But it’s not so likely that they experienced it as interruption into the radios in their homes, streaming or not. My doing so, is likely the result of the signal boosting and amplification, along with ground plane and other directional antennas or antenna effect, that enable the mobbing. The heightened level of interruption resolves and the broadcast quality returns to more or less normal about a minute before I stop the recording.
I recently posted the less than successful interjection of the mobber’s radio into a streaming television broadcast in A brief update on the mobbing in Albany, California, and maybe some venting. That mobber middlemanning occurred on the day I had the natural gas water heater and service shut down at the Albany house. This week, in lieu of upgrading the old gas meter, PG&E offered to remove it. I took them up on the offer. This makes any abandoned gas piping or service connections within the reach of bad actors much less of a threat and though I am not yet sure of the degree of the effect, I believe it is positive.
For another recording of mobber-botched streamus interruptus, read Mobbing noise: Signal diversion and the failure to sound.
