The Phone Losers of America web site champions pranks of all kinds, especially ones associated with technology. One of their standard pranks is taking over the radio communication system used at the drive-up window of fast-food restaurants.

They really out did themselves by creating a video that describes how to mod a CB radio to work on fast food restaurant frequencies. (Hmm, it seems unlikely that a 27 MHz transceiver could be easily modified for VHF.) Oh, I see, they use a special crystal found in modern day toasters. That explains it.

Warning: some adult language

Be sure to look at the comments on the video. The prank keeps on going.

I do not condone nor support modifying radios for out-of-band operation, hassling employees of fast food restaurants or posting hilarious videos on youtube.com

73, Bob K0NR

I have this blog configured so that all comments are moderated. It seems that without this, spammers and scammers like to post all kinds of useless stuff. So when you post a comment, it may take a day or two for me to notice it and process it. (It depends on my schedule, of course.)

I generally approve any comments that have substance. If you just rant and rave, it will go into the bit bucket. I usually reject anonymous comments, so please include your first name and amateur radio callsign when you post a comment.

I do appreciate your thoughts, so keep them coming!

Although I am very much a techie, I often lag in adopting the latest consumer technology. I don’t need to be the first one on my block to own the latest gizmo, since that usually means paying more for less, compared to waiting until next year. However, since our household has this pressing “need” for a new television, it forced me to confront this business of Digital TV and HDTV.

The FCC has decided that good, old analog TV will end in February 2009. Many, but not all, television stations are already transmitting in digital format, whether high definition or not. After February 2009, the analog transmitters will be pretty much shut down. This makes me wonder how this is really going to play out as the general public seems to be rather clueless about the great analog-to-digital switch that is coming. Sure, they are starting to buy those super-sized big screen HDTVs to watch The Big Game. But do they realize that the little 19-inch color tube will go dark in 2009? Consumer information is starting to show up on various web sites telling the general public about the change. The NTIA is running a coupon program to subsidize converter boxes to keep those old analog TVs running. It seems that the feds felt a little guilty taking Grandma’s TV away while pocketing the money from selling the vacated spectrum.

This will directly affect viewers that receive the signal over the air. Television viewers that get their signal from cable or satellite are likely to be buffered from the change to digital by the settop box that decodes the signal for them. I also stumbled across an exemption for Low Power TV stations and translators. Translators are used in rural areas to retransmit television signals from the larger metro areas. Apparently, the FCC decided to not force the digital transition out in the sticks.

We brought the DTV home and hooked it up. Its role in life is to be the kitchen TV, where there happens to be no convenient TV antenna jack. (I’ve got a decent VHF/UHF TV antenna on the roof of the house that picks up signals from two major cities, Denver and Colorado Springs, but the coax doesn’t go to the kitchen.) Anticipating the problem, I bought a $10 “rabbit ears plus UHF loop” antenna to get the TV on the air quickly. I figured this would be a dismal failure and the next job on the list will be fishing RG-6 cable up through the wall. To my surprise, the DTV picked up all of the Colorado Springs stations flawlessly. And I do mean flawlessly…that’s the thing about digital…the signal is either there or not. Previously, on analog TV, we’d see all kinds of interesting lines and snow come and go, depending on the phase of the moon and the multipath distortion off the nearby mountains. But the digital picture is rock steady. Really impressive. I temporarily hooked the DTV to the roof antenna and the Denver stations popped in picture perfect as well.

One by one, the analog stuff in my house is converting to digital. The biggest exception: amateur radio equipment.

Holy Freaking Cow! Try to count all of those cellphones. From Reuters:

HELSINKI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion — equivalent to half the global population — on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said. Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.
“The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth,” Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement.

This does not necessarily mean that half of the people in the world have cellphones…some people own more than one. But still, who would have thunk it? No wonder 2 Meters is so quiet….everyone is busy yakking on the phone. In the race for number of wireless devices, the cellphone has beaten the 2M handheld. See my posting about my cool dualband rig.

Now, if we could just get people to use the vibrate mode on the phones, so I don’t have to listen to several billion obnoxious ring tones.

73, Bob K0NR

I picked up a new rig the other day. It is a dualband handheld radio that supports the latest digital formats. It has a number of innovative features that are not very common in ham radio equipment. The text messaging feature allows you to send simple ASCII messages to other radio users. The built-in MP3 player can play tunes via the built-in speakers or a stereo headset. The microSD memory slot allows for easy change out of stored tunes and expansion of memory. This rig is compatible with Bluetooth headsets which puts the “wireless” back in wireless. It has a really nice color display that can display “wallpaper” to personalize the device.

The rig includes some very handy features such as a world clock, calendar and calculator. You never know when you might need to calculate the length of a dipole antenna or the resonant frequency of an LC circuit. The battery life on standby is an amazing 16 days. A 1.3 Megapixel camera allows you to take photos and store them to the memory card slot. The two frequency bands are 800 MHz and 1900 MHz.

Yeah, that’s right, it is a Verizon cell phone (LG VX-8300).