Wednesday, April 23, 2014

"We Have Taken Control of Your Television Set"



Except that it's not fiction. In an emergency, the Army now has (or soon will have) the capability to do just that. And FEMA is interested in adopting the Army's pysops capabilities.

Only wrinkle is, I don't know how they're planning to take over CATV systems. Not that ComBastards, Charter or any of the other weenies would even quibble about it.
on or about

2 comments:

  1. BadTux4/25/2014 2:48 AM

    It used to be called the Emergency Broadcast System, and was run out of a bunker in Colorado. Now it's the Emergency Alert System and comprises two heavily fortified containers at transmitter sites around the nation, but has some issues in that someone has to go out to the tower and physically turn on the EAS generator and physically connect the EAS transmitter to the tower to override the signal. The next generation is supposed to deal with that.

    That said, I just read the Army spec, and they're full of shit. There are software defined frequency-hopping wide band radios, yes. An iPhone is one of them, for example. But there aren't *high powered* software defined frequency-hopping wide band radios, other than the specialized ones created for radar systems. All COTS radio gear capable of putting out the 10,000 to 100,000 watts of a commercial radio station has tube finals because there are no semiconductors capable of handling the wattage, and is capable of handling only a single frequency at a time. Where multiple frequencies are transmitted through one antenna, multiple transmitters and a large plenum are needed (the plenum is to prevent one transmitter's output from feeding back into another transmitter and destroying it, it's basically a giant LC filter... as in, bigger than your average minivan).

    Yet more waste of taxpayer money chasing unicorns, in other words...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Comrade Misfit4/25/2014 10:10 AM

    Hey, I know folks who are being paid good money to chase down those unicorns!

    :)

    ReplyDelete

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