This was extremely weird!

This morning around 3:00 AM Central Time, I awoke to the sound of my radio cutting in and out like a CD with a scratch on it. You know, when you try to listen to a scratched up disc or watch a messed up DVD and it skips every second? That's what the radio was doing. Now here's the weird part. Every time the radio would "skip", during the half-second of silence, the baby monitor in our room would suddenly produce high-pitched frequency. That monitor is already "static-ee", because of where we have to put it due to the wall outlets, but it works fine and I can hear my son when he moves or cries. It sounded like someone was shifting through stations on the monitor, every time the radio shorted out or skipped or whatever. I want to know what could have caused this strange phenomenon. I have NEVER heard a radio skip like that. If there is a bad signal, it produces static and distortion. It wasn't an electronic short, because the back-light on the display wasn't flickering with the skipping. Does anyone know why this happened? After about 10 minutes it stopped and went back to normal. And I went back to sleep, confused.

Isn't it normal when there's a cellphone close by? I've seen it with my radio it starts skipping when there's an SMS or call coming in or for no apparent reason too when there's a cellphone close by.

reply to post by jamiros


No, I know the sound a cellphone signal produces in electronic sound equipment. It definitely wasn't that. Plus there was no cellphone activity anyway, and especially not for 10+ minutes.

is the monitor analogue or digital and do you have any cordless telephones

reply to post by booda


The monitor is digital. I don't have cordless telephones. I don't have a land-line at all, only cellphones.

sounds like some kind of electrical interference and maybe something in the skies passing when it happened....do you know what frequency the monitor works on....

found this that may help

www.life123.com...

[edit on 18/11/2009 by booda]

Yeah oddly last night around the same exact time the emergency broadcast system alert began coming on literally about every five minutes. No alert mentioned just said it was the weekly test. After around five times I finally turned the tv off.

I usually hear electronic noise coming through my TV when I'm about to receive a text message. Sometimes I hear the same noise and I don't get anything. I just assume its a signal from someone else's phone.

To the OP: Know an extreme texters in your area?
That could be what you heard.

reply to post by OrphenFire

It sounds like a nearby and or powerful transmitter was transmitting and swamping the analog radio and making the sound on the digital monitor.

We have an emergency system in the UK that does similar, it seems to pulse for about half a second every 4 seconds or so.

This is because of interference from various signals being active or passing through wavelengths in your area. Therefore causing unusual disturbances never heard before. Or it could be aliens trying to contact you. :p

It sounds like a signal was jamming your radio, and at the same time causing distortion to come through the monitor. Can you remember what frequency the radio was tuned to and find out what frequency the monitor uses? A comparison might be able to locate at least what frequency was being used for the jamming/distortion.

PersonalChoice's comments are interesting as well. Does anyone know if the Emergency Broadcast System uses radio frequency to activate?

TheRedneck

reply to post by TheRedneck


Yeah maybe. My first thought in that dead hour was "WTF? Is someone trying to jam my baby monitor so they can kidnap my kid?!" My second was maybe an electronic warfare plane was passing overhead. (I was in the Navy and took advanced electronics.)

But why would a signal be jamming my radio or baby monitor? When I get home I will find out what frequency the monitor was on. The radio was tuned to 102.9 FM.

By the way, I live in the DFW metroplex.

reply to post by OrphenFire

Could it be related to this meteor event over Utah?
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by ConspiracyCracker
I usually hear electronic noise coming through my TV when I'm about to receive a text message. Sometimes I hear the same noise and I don't get anything. I just assume its a signal from someone else's phone.

To the OP: Know an extreme texters in your area?
That could be what you heard.

I already said it wasn't cellphone activity. I know what that sounds like.

Originally posted by PapaKrok
reply to post by OrphenFire

 

Could it be related to this meteor event over Utah?
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Hhhmm... If the meteor was big enough, maybe. Midnight in UT would be 1:00 AM here in Dallas. The interference happened at 3:00 AM. If that had anything to do with it, it could have been fighters scrambling the skies for some reason. Maybe the meteor was more than a meteor.

reply to post by OrphenFire

It likely wasn't trying to jam your radio; more likely would be a signal that just happened to jam it. But 102.9 MHz is right in the middle of civilian bandwidth. Why would a military exercise be broadcasting anything around that frequency?

2 hours after the meteor... hmmm... you know, I never heard if that meteor actually hit anything; I had assumed it didn't. Perhaps it could have been a localized explosion on the meteor itself, as in some sort of material reached spontaneous combustion? But that wouldn't have been repetitive, would it? I dunno, just thinking out loud. DFW is not exactly close to the path of that meteor (Utah - Idaho as I understand it).

You definitely have a strange occurrence happening there. I'll keep thinking on it; let me know what that other frequency is (and if you can, estimate the frequency of the noise you heard on it). Maybe we'll come up with something.

TheRedneck

Sounds like general interference from a near by transmitter of some sort.
51MHz is right in the 6 Meter ham radio band which is just a little ways up from 49MHz used by baby monitors and baby monitors are notorious for picking up stuff near the band they operate on. Also the second harmonic frequency of 51MHz is 102MHz and you said your radio was tuned to a channel near that.
Harmonics are a multiple of the original frequency, so someone operating on 51mhz could cause some interference on 102MHz if they don't use a proper filter on their equipment.
So it could have been a ham operator tuning up his equipment and accidentally caused a bit of interference to your stuff.

As others have said cell phones can cause all kinds of interference to near by electronics because of their cruddy designs and UHF and sometimes microwave frequencies used. House cordless phones are no different.
Just because no one in your house was using one doesn't mean your next door neighbor wasn't but usually they have to be in close proximity to cause problems but who knows.

Either way I highly doubt it was aliens. As we all know aliens only talk through AM radios :p

reply to post by darklife

OK, so the monitor does operate at a harmonic. I would suspect the actual frequency would be at around 102.9 MHz, with the monitor picking up a double-wavelength harmonic. I say this because the actual jamming was done at 102.9 MHz, and the interference was at the monitor frequency. Depending on the circuitry, a slightly off-frequency signal can give an audio 'whine'.

I did think of something: when I was younger and playing around with electronics, I often made things that would bleed through into radios. Also, experimenters are somewhat notorious for violating power restrictions (that is NOT an admission of guilt! ), especially late at night. That actually sounds like some sort of transmitter project based on the fact it was intermittent and regular. It's amazing what a simple NE556 can accomplish.

I'd look around the neighborhood to see who has a lot of little Radio Shack shrink cards in their trash.

TheRedneck

reply to post by TheRedneck


Haha . Thanks guys. I think you all have it figured out for me. My wife threw away the box for the monitor, and I wasn't feeling like opening the thing up to mess around with it (plus my multimeter and o-scope aren't here, so I can't have much fun with it anyway), so I don't know the exact frequency the monitor operates at. Anyhow, it was probably a tech-head neighbor messing around with stuff. I will find out who it is and make a new friend, perhaps