Weapons of Mass Distraction
My beauty sleep was cut short this morning by a large moving truck at a neighbor's house with their radio cranked up. Now the music wasn't bad at all, but the commercials and dj had to go. And I had a plan. I put some coffee on to brew, took a shower, caught up with work related emails (decided to work from home today) and began preparations to rock their world. So to speak.
Now with mechanical things, I'm lucky if I get the hammer pointed the right direction. (And was mightily impressed with ger-bean's shelving work!) With electronics, even with no training, I'm deadly. Just ask a certain Marble lady about a coffee-pot I hot wired for her. (I blame the explosion on cheap components.) Anyway, I had come into possession of a small FM transmitter.
The neat thing about this was discovering, upon poking around, that the power output wasn't hardwired, but controlled by a simple rheostat underneath a plate behind the batteries (with something scratched on it about a void warranty.) Which was only set to half-way, leaving all the wasted wattage the FCC doesn't want us mere civilians to muck with. Of course I had cranked it up to block party levels and it was indeed a very powerful little gizmo with this little mod. Plugged into AC, I tested its range at over 500 feet. More than ample for my experiment.
While sipping coffee I rummaged through my sound files, selecting a really nice one with howling wolves and dogs out of some horror flick. The annoying dj on the radio made it easy to zero in by announcing the station's frequency. The fool. So I set the track to loop, set the transmitter to the frequency and at that precise moment, the music stopped. Damn. They were all packed up and drove off, blatantly unaware that their bad timing foiled my morning entertainment. Sigh.
Now with mechanical things, I'm lucky if I get the hammer pointed the right direction. (And was mightily impressed with ger-bean's shelving work!) With electronics, even with no training, I'm deadly. Just ask a certain Marble lady about a coffee-pot I hot wired for her. (I blame the explosion on cheap components.) Anyway, I had come into possession of a small FM transmitter.
The neat thing about this was discovering, upon poking around, that the power output wasn't hardwired, but controlled by a simple rheostat underneath a plate behind the batteries (with something scratched on it about a void warranty.) Which was only set to half-way, leaving all the wasted wattage the FCC doesn't want us mere civilians to muck with. Of course I had cranked it up to block party levels and it was indeed a very powerful little gizmo with this little mod. Plugged into AC, I tested its range at over 500 feet. More than ample for my experiment.
While sipping coffee I rummaged through my sound files, selecting a really nice one with howling wolves and dogs out of some horror flick. The annoying dj on the radio made it easy to zero in by announcing the station's frequency. The fool. So I set the track to loop, set the transmitter to the frequency and at that precise moment, the music stopped. Damn. They were all packed up and drove off, blatantly unaware that their bad timing foiled my morning entertainment. Sigh.
Yes, Marbella has experienced quite a few of a certain cub's "fix-it" projects. She would have to admit though that all the items, the coffee pot, vacuum cleaner and hedge clippers(to name a few) worked like brand new when she had occasion to use them again. Would it spoil the story if she said, "It might be because they were brand new".
ReplyDeleteROFL...ya know they make linear boosters that could kick that sucker up even higher...but no telling what your modified sine waves might have done to the distant neighbors pacemaker.
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