November 02, 2004

GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM

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Remember the story late last month of the student whose TV started sending distress signals that were picked up by Langley Air Force Base?

The New York Times did a follow-up and found out that it's not all that rare for our appliances to communicate without our authorization.

Seems that there is an old distress frequency mandated by Congress in the 1970s which just so happens to correspond with signals emitted by everything from toaster ovens to TVs.

In fact, in the United States, only 369 - or 3 percent - of the more than 12,000 distress signals in 2003 proved to be real emergencies.

In 2000, for instance, the emergency system started receiving weekly distress calls from Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Ark., after the University of Arkansas unveiled a new, 30 feet by 107 feet SmartVision scoreboard. Its video processor system, it seems, was emitting spurious signals on the 121.5 frequency.

Posted by Jeff at November 2, 2004 05:35 AM | TrackBack
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