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You pretty much can't hide a transmitter. If you're broadcasting with illegal power levels, it's pretty trivial to walk around with a directional antenna and tr
by mystified5016 2y ago
You pretty much can't hide a transmitter. If you're broadcasting with illegal power levels, it's pretty trivial to walk around with a directional antenna and triangulate the source transmitter. If you're curious, look up "radio foxhunting". Some people do it as a hobby.
Your only hope is to set up an unattended transmitter, connect to it through the internet, and spend your effort obscuring that connection. Creating an untraceable connection through the internet is a lot simpler.
Aside: you could actually obscure the location of your transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some tricks with phase and frequency. Ultimately you're still trying to hide a guy in a crowd screaming into a megaphone. They'll find you eventually, you can only make it harder for them.
- kstrauser 2y agoThis is all exactly right. A reasonable analogy is to think of the antenna as a lightbulb that either changes color quickly or changes brightness quickly to send a signal. If you find yourself bathed in, say, green light, it's pretty easy to look around until you see the green lightbulb. It's very nearly the same here except that radio waves are at a much lower frequency than visible light. If you see a signal at 14.313 MHz, you can swing an antenna around and walk in the strongest direction until you get to the source, modulo reflections and whatnot.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoExactly. Consider the guys with absolutely the most reason to want to hide a radio station: the military. They're not worrying about the FCC, they're worrying about antiradiation missiles. Do they have a way of hiding a transmitter? Only by things designed to make it look like noise and that requires the receiver to know how to recognize the signal in the noise. If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
- akira2501 2y ago> Do they have a way of hiding a transmitter? Spread spectrum and/or frequency hopping. > If they can't hide it, you can't, either. The reason you can't hide it is because it's an FM modulated signal on an actual carrier frequency. It's designed to be received by cheap consumer radios in the clear.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoAs I said, making it look like noise.
- hypercube33 2y agoAren't there frequencies that can go through the planet though? I thought even near me there are large antenna farms that broadcast to nuclear submarines. How do you pinpoint those if you're not looking from the air? Just curious. I should probably get my ham
- LorenPechtel 2y agoThe nations capable of fielding SSBNs know where each other's antennas are--they're simply too big to hide.
- dylan604 2y agoTo hide your pirate radio, you load it up into a jeep and only transmit while on the move. talk hard!
- cobbal 2y agoThey have ways to deal with that too. https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-jammer-in-car-to-stop-driver-calls-fcc-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-jamme...
- dylan604 2y agoJamming other radios vs broadcast a pirate radio signal are not exactly the same thing though. Interrupting someone else's signal is definitely going to get people's attention. If this was just an FM radio broadcast, it would fly much further under the radar.
- Enginerrrd 2y ago>you could actually obscure the location of your transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some tricks with phase and frequency. ...Can you elaborate on this? I'm quite curious.