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The article states that they used "a Radar Engineers 240A Noise Signature Receiver and UHF Yagi antenna to survey the affected block." Looks like a somewhat po

The article states that they used "a Radar Engineers 240A Noise Signature Receiver and UHF Yagi antenna to survey the affected block." Looks like a somewhat portable device (MODEL 243): http://www.radarengineers.com/rfitvi.htm http://www.radarengineers.com/rfitvi.htm Although it's probably going to cost you $5-10k USD. Pretty easy to hook up a RTL-SDR ($10) to a cheap Android tablet loaded with SDR Touch for simple surveying.

tzs 10y ago
I tried to get a price check by dropping "Radar Engineers 240A Noise Signature Receiver" into Google's shopping search, and for some reason all it gave me was one result: a "My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Guardians of Harmony Fan Series Figure - Princess Celestia" from Toys'R'Us. Google is very weird sometimes. Note: I have never watched "My Little Pony", collected anything related, visited any My Little Pony fan sites, read any My Little Pony fan fiction (not even accidentally, via crossovers from fandoms whose fiction I do read), or done anything else to show any interest whatsoever in My Little Pony. Google has a ton of information about me with regards to things I might actually buy, so why the heck did they pick My Little Pony? (Heck, I'm pretty sure they have figure out that I have a ham license...surely they have something more relevant for me than My Little Pony).
- dekhn 10y ago
  I get the same results so I let Google know the results weren't correct. If you drop any one word from the query, you get better results.
- i_are_smart 10y ago
  Just one result? I wonder if it was one of their plant results. I've heard rumors of Google seeding some (just a few) obscured google searches with totally irrelevant results, so they can catch competitors scraping results from their site.
- KMag 10y ago
  Back when I worked at Google on the indexing system, the guy who sat next to me introduced http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfield-ninja-turtles http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfiel... . In his defense, it was someone else's code that he started using more broadly, and there was a latent bug in the third person's code that didn't special-case a sentinel value used for one of the similarity metrics. So, he added some analysis, and all of a sudden Google thought all of the pages that didn't have this similarity metric calculated were all extremely similar. Our manager bought him a stuffed Garfield as a "prize" for breaking Google.
nullc 10y ago
I thought it was interesting that they mention using a yagi. For hunting a strong signal, the traditional tool is antenna with a deep null such a loop antenna. The reason for this is because the null at a point can be very deep relative to the average response-- e.g. maybe a small directional antenna has 10dB difference between the front and the side, but a small antenna engineered to have a deep null can easily have 40+ dB of isolation between a null and the side. To search for a signal using a null you aim until the signal goes away and you go in that direction. :) And it's easy to construct antennas with only two (or one) null. For a directional antenna like a yagi you have various reflections hitting the antennas sidelobes, making it harder to read.

tzs 10y ago

I tried to get a price check by dropping "Radar Engineers 240A Noise Signature Receiver" into Google's shopping search, and for some reason all it gave me was one result: a "My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Guardians of Harmony Fan Series Figure - Princess Celestia" from Toys'R'Us. Google is very weird sometimes. Note: I have never watched "My Little Pony", collected anything related, visited any My Little Pony fan sites, read any My Little Pony fan fiction (not even accidentally, via crossovers from fandoms whose fiction I do read), or done anything else to show any interest whatsoever in My Little Pony. Google has a ton of information about me with regards to things I might actually buy, so why the heck did they pick My Little Pony? (Heck, I'm pretty sure they have figure out that I have a ham license...surely they have something more relevant for me than My Little Pony).

dekhn 10y ago
I get the same results so I let Google know the results weren't correct. If you drop any one word from the query, you get better results.
i_are_smart 10y ago
Just one result? I wonder if it was one of their plant results. I've heard rumors of Google seeding some (just a few) obscured google searches with totally irrelevant results, so they can catch competitors scraping results from their site.
KMag 10y ago
Back when I worked at Google on the indexing system, the guy who sat next to me introduced http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfield-ninja-turtles http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfiel... . In his defense, it was someone else's code that he started using more broadly, and there was a latent bug in the third person's code that didn't special-case a sentinel value used for one of the similarity metrics. So, he added some analysis, and all of a sudden Google thought all of the pages that didn't have this similarity metric calculated were all extremely similar. Our manager bought him a stuffed Garfield as a "prize" for breaking Google.

nullc 10y ago

I thought it was interesting that they mention using a yagi. For hunting a strong signal, the traditional tool is antenna with a deep null such a loop antenna. The reason for this is because the null at a point can be very deep relative to the average response-- e.g. maybe a small directional antenna has 10dB difference between the front and the side, but a small antenna engineered to have a deep null can easily have 40+ dB of isolation between a null and the side. To search for a signal using a null you aim until the signal goes away and you go in that direction. :) And it's easy to construct antennas with only two (or one) null. For a directional antenna like a yagi you have various reflections hitting the antennas sidelobes, making it harder to read.