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What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
- surfingdino 2y agoThat tower is TikToker magnet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pjerem 2y agoOK that was pretty unexpected :)
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoBeing curious is a virtue. Now I know how to avoid having to deal with a copper flavored pickle if I get too close to my nearest AM transmitter.
- greesil 2y agoNot to state the obvious, but isn't there a damned good reason the tower is fenced off? You can see the fence in several of the pictures.
- unkeen 2y agoHow is it possible that these towers have not been made more difficult to access? Is it usual for them to be secured only by a low fence?!
- mcpherrinm 2y agoThe AM radio tower that I know is near me has a short wooden fence close to the tower, and then a larger area surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire tops and warning signs.
- qwertox 2y agoAs soon as some kids jump over the fence and at least one of them ends up in a hospital with a severe condition, those fences will get replaced.
- ljf 2y agoI mentioned over dinner at my parents house (about 20 years ago) that I'd read that running 240v through a gherkin would cause it to glow - and pretty much as soon as dinner was over, my father and I had the experiment set up. Gherkins and even pickled onions glowed brilliantly. I set up a basic site to share the video we'd taken and details of the experiment, and shared it to B3ta. Sadly all lost to time.
- hinkley 2y agoPretty sure my high school physics teacher did this one.
- bsder 2y ago"WRL Technical Note TN-13 Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems" https://simh.trailing-edge.com/semi/docs/WRL-TN-13.pdf https://simh.trailing-edge.com/semi/docs/WRL-TN-13.pdf
- vatys 2y agoFurther testing indicated that the taste was neither enhanced nor diminished, but remained ‘‘very much like a pickle.’’ Our conclusion is that the culinary potential of electrical stimulation is limited.
- voidUpdate 2y agoI think bigclive would disagree about that, he is known for electrocuting his sausage and sometimes enjoying the taste after
- smolder 2y agoThis is gold and I will be keeping this .PDF in my rather limited data hoard.
- dekhn 2y agoOne of the authors, Alan Eustace, was an exec at Google (in the days when execs at Google had a clue) and also holds the record for highest jump (135K feet).
- kazinator 2y agoIf it's forty below, your pickle freezes to the tower and you have to call 911.
- chilling 2y agoSometimes I feel sorry for myself when I read articles like this. At the end of the page, I usually start asking myself, "Why was I even curious about this?" Anyway, I will probably use this knowledge in 10 years. Hopefully (so far, that’s how things have been going for me).
- thepuppet33r 2y agoI mean, sometimes it's edifying to just find out cool stuff about the world and the ways it feels a little magical. We have a local power company here that has a trailer with a set of power wires and a transformer on it, and at their events, a TRAINED linesman will do tricks with it. They spend the first half of the presentation doing safety instructions ("don't touch the wire because you'll get fried", "here's how squirrels can cause shorts") and the other half doing magic tricks like making pinwheels spin, metal film levitate, etc. Fun stuff to see.
- bjornsing 2y agoA grounded pickle. The word grounded is very important here, and missing from the question in the title.
- geerlingguy 2y agoWe also tested a floating hot dog (we detached the leads from the ground wire, so it was basically the hot dog and about 3' of unattached copper wire), and it still made little sounds as it was touched to the tower. We didn't have a way to safely touch the hot dog with no extra wire attached, unfortunately.
- eternauta3k 2y agoI wonder if a floating human would still get zapped, due to its non-trivial capacitance to ground.
- geerlingguy 2y agoMany tower climbers historically jumped onto AM towers (usually at lower power levels), and they still felt little shocks climbing the tower. Even if the tower is off, if it's near any other sites, they can draw a significant amount of RF (as a good AM tower is a good AM antenna) and if it's not grounded, that RF will go through a person too! This specific tower site doesn't require lights on the shorter towers, so it's not an issue here, but for sites with lights needing replacement, most nowadays turn off power to the tower and ground it before anyone climbs the tower.
- bityard 2y agoNot to do with RF, but there are old YT videos of HV linemen who literally hop out a helicopter onto an HV transmission line to manually inspect it. As the helicopter approaches, they hold out a long pole which is bonded to the aircraft's frame to bring it to the same potential as the line. It starts arcing quite a few feet out until the potential is neutralized and the lineman can "safely" step out onto the line and start working. I imagine this inspection work is done with camera-equipped quadcopters nowadays.
- Supernaut 2y agoWhat I didn't see explained in these videos, and which I'm now curious about, is the mechanism by which the hot dogs convert the radio signal into sound? I understand how a loudspeaker works, but since food products typically don't contain coils and magnets, how was the AM signal being demodulated and converted into sound waves?
- winrid 2y agoJust the sparks themselves can produce audio! [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/lbubH1FovFc?si=T7Q7CqDNz3NtbLFl https://youtu.be/lbubH1FovFc?si=T7Q7CqDNz3NtbLFl
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eternauta3k 2y agoPutting an AM signal through any non linear process will give you (shitty) demodulation.
- ryukoposting 2y agoI'm not an RF engineer, but I'll take a stab at it: With any modulation scheme, you have the "carrier signal" and the "message signal." The carrier is the frequency you dial into your radio. The message is the thing you listen to - voice, music, whatever. Those two get "modulated" together and blasted out over an antenna, and ta-daa, radio! Amplitude Modulation is really, really simple. It's literally just the product of the carrier signal by the message signal. The carrier signal is a really high frequency relative to the message, which is where I'm guessing the "resolution" of the signal comes from. Now, hot dogs. Hot dogs probably don't resonate very well. Or, maybe they do, but just a little bit at low-ish frequencies - up to a couple thousand Hertz, but no higher. If that's the case, then a hot dog would act like a low pass filter! Since AM is just the product of a high-frequency carrier and a low-frequency message, a low-pass filter could ostensibly leave behind something that resembles the message signal. Proper AM demodulation involves diodes and whatnot, but I can't imagine a hot dog has semiconductive properties. Now, if it's an electrical signal, why can we hear it through the hot dog? A hot dog is not a good antenna. It's bad at inducing an electromagnetic field around itself. Instead, it converts the energy from the radio tower into mechanical force - motion, like the way a speaker moves. All of this could be wrong. Maybe the hot dog isn't serving as a filter, and it is indeed reproducing the AM carrier signal - it's just too high of a frequency for us to hear it. I don't remember my signal processing classes well enough to say for sure. Maybe my whole "hot dog is a speaker" explanation is bunk. Maybe hot dogs really are semiconductors. Not sure.
- tokai 2y agoReminded me of this old classic video of some intrepid guys getting tufts of grass to play music with the help of a radio tower. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9UO9tn4MpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9UO9tn4MpI
- _joel 2y agoDon't tell Rick Sanchez
- BoxOfRain 2y agoA soapbox of mine here in the UK is that since BBC and commercial AM radio is more or less dead with the remaining stations set to close over the next few years, Ofcom should open up the band to low-power broadcasting hobbyists. These already exist illegitimately and have done for decades, you can pick up plenty from the Netherlands and a few domestic ones as well on a sporadic schedule. It would be a nice thing to do from several angles I think and would help drive interest in radio as a technology in general; as well as building transmitters and aerial systems, there's things like setting up an audio processing chain to get the best possible modulation and being a disc jockey which will always have a bit of a buzz from being on the 'real' radio. If valves and vintage equipment are involved it would be an interesting form of technology history preservation and 'living history', and there's also an environmental angle where old analogue radio receivers could be prevented from becoming e-waste. There could be a minimal licencing regime to demonstrate the individual is not a complete numpty and a fee to PRS for music rights along the lines of how streaming works. Maximum power could be kept low especially at night to avoid interfering with countries in Europe where AM radio is still an active platform, and I don't think there'd need to be a lot of enforcement with respect to content since you'd only realistically be broadcasting to other anoraks. Additionally there's already precedent for non-profit stations where the medium of AM itself plays a role, for example former pirate Radio Caroline which uses it to keep its historic radio ship in operation.
- bArray 2y agoI think lots of communities running localised AM stations could be super cool. > There could be a minimal licencing regime to demonstrate the individual is not a complete numpty [..] I wouldn't bother and it just adds more resistance. > [..] and a fee to PRS for music rights along the lines of how streaming works. I think the quality is so low and the audience so few that it wouldn't matter. > Maximum power could be kept low especially at night to avoid interfering with countries in Europe where AM radio is still an active platform, [..] Yeah, not sure where the sweet zone would be though. > [..] and I don't think there'd need to be a lot of enforcement with respect to content since you'd only realistically be broadcasting to other anoraks. That would be the point, just low-power decentralised communities. Only real reason to get involved is if the power goes too high or band use is not respectful to other users.
- thelastparadise 2y agoI'll be keeping my pickle far away from any radio towers.
- tabtab 2y agoIf you simply had my personality, your pickle would never be at risk of getting used.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI always wonder if there would be any pain in the death that results from touching one of these. I’d assume it’d be instant from the electricity traveling through your heart - or would you just burn up more slowly?
- tigerlily 2y agoMight end up in hospital for three days, and then die.
- alnwlsn 2y agoI've been gently bit by a small Tesla coil before (100s of kHz but lower frequency than AM). There is absolutely no 'electrical' pain to speak of - it is nothing like getting a static shock or touching line voltage. However, it still hurts because it burns you, like touching a tiny flame, which is the only way I could tell anything was happening. It also vaporizes your skin, which smells terrible.
- gosub100 2y agoit may not kill you. the ways that electricity harms the body is unpredictable. Depends on things like bare skin vs gloves, humidity, sweat, what phase your heart is in at that exact moment, and probably many more factors. since the voltage is oscillating very quickly, it _may_ not cause your muscles to lock up, so you _may_ just get the zap of your life and bounce off. Whereas other types (non-RF) electrocution cause the muscles to lockup and for them to remain in contact with the voltage, which increases the chances of death.
- JohnMakin 2y agoAll I’m reading from this is “electric shock - nature’s russian roulette.” What you wrote makes sense from my layman’s understanding. thanks!
- Johnythree 2y agoBecause your nerves don't respond to high frequencies, you cannot "feel" RF current. What you do feel is the intense burning associated with the RF energy being converted to heat.
- justanother 2y agoI understand he got permission and everything was checked out by actual RF eggheads, but damn. I won't even change a HV run capacitor unless i'm wearing crocs, standing on cement, and wearing the rubber oven mitts. And even then, I keep one hand behind my back. Because there have been accidents, and they hurt (the pool pump run cap fails approximately annually in this climate and if I paid someone to change it every time, I'd be a lot poorer). That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoWhy standing on cement? Wouldn't cement be considered a ground?
- alexjplant 2y agoIndeed it is. Anybody who's spent time jamming in old basements with bad ground or two-prong plugs has learned this the hard way via a microphone or guitar (myself included). Shoes are essential - not even flip-flops are good enough because even something as simple as walking across a wet lawn will leave enough residual moisture to zap you.
- SoftTalker 2y agoJust short the terminals with a screwdriver before you touch anything else? (Look away in case there's an brief arc flash)
- justanother 2y agoYeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.
- FiatLuxDave 2y agoOh man, that reminds me of a mistake I made a few years back. I had opened up a motor controller to fix it, and I knew to discharge the cap before messing around inside. I applied a screwdriver across the terminals to short it out, and was rewarded with a beautiful long and skinny arc as the screwdriver came into contact. I said out loud, "That was cool", and my coworker sitting behind me said, "What was cool"? I told him that I had just shorted out the cap and the arc looked really cool. So he said, "Can you show me?" I said sure, and plugged the controller in for a few seconds to recharge it, then unplugged it and proceeded to repeat what I had just done. What I had forgotten was that previously the motor controller had been unplugged overnight. When I touched the screwdriver to the freshly charged capacitor, there was a boom, a three inch fireball, and the end of the screwdriver was completely gone. As I sat there thunderstruck, my coworker said, "You're right. That was pretty cool".
- chadcmulligan 2y agoyou can light up fluorescent tubes as well https://youtu.be/SDL9O2Fwb64 https://youtu.be/SDL9O2Fwb64
- geerlingguy 2y agoWe actually tried that experiment; the tubes we had were a little older, so not sure how much that affected it vs the power at this site (the middle tower is 7 kW, which is a lot less than the 50 kW towers at more mid/high power AM sites). But it didn't light up near the tower. It did near the RF circuits above the phasor, though!
- chadcmulligan 2y agoI have heard the story a number of times from old radio guys that it works
- amelius 2y agoWhy isn't there a bigger fence around it?
- JCM9 2y agoFor folks wondering why these sort of videos (there are lots on YouTube) always focus on AM towers: 1. On AM the radio energy literally pulses (the amplitude modulation) and thus the arcs of plasma will pulse too thus creating the audio noise. AM has a carrier wave that’s constant but the two sidebands of signal pulse from zero energy at silence to more power the louder the sound being transmitted. FM signals broadcast essentially the same power all the time since it’s the frequency and not the amplitude that’s changing. 2. Because the signal frequency is much lower on the AM broadcast bands the wavelength is much larger and thus the antennas are much bigger. On AM the tower itself is typically the antenna vs FM radio where the antenna is typically only a meter or two long at the top of a very tall tower. That’s what makes AM towers more dangerous as the tower can be carrying many kW of energy and if you touch it you’ll go zap zap. The towers typically sit on top of a ceramic insulator to insulate them from the ground whereas FM towers typically just are attached right to the ground (although with grounding straps for lightning protection). Finally (some folks don’t always know this) you can operate AM on the frequencies typically used for FM… it’s just a mode and works on any frequency. Aviation radios operate on AM but in the VHF band near FM broadcast frequencies.
- timr 2y agoAnother thing to note, since people seem to be focusing on the RF aspect of this: there's 20-30 Amps running to the tower in this video. If your body is the connection to ground for a 20 Amp current, from any source, you're going to have a lot more to worry about than a burnt pickle (I guess it's cool that you'd make radio sounds while you died?) When they put the pickle/hotdog/whatever an inch away from the tower without actually touching it, it doesn't even get warm. This isn't RF, it's just standard-issue AC electrocution. Maybe the one "radio" thing here is that the ground underneath a tower like this is essentially a big metal mesh, but even that isn't a factor -- they're literally hooking a jumper cable from the pickle to ground.
- geerlingguy 2y agoRF burns are a lot different than electrocution-style burns, though. But I'm not an expert on either topic, I'd defer to some people who know more about it.
- JosephRedfern 2y agoI'm curious as to how much paperwork was involved here. Was the pickle grounding out the transmitter and (presumably) interrupting the broadcast not an issue?
- Johnythree 2y agoThe pickle will shunt (steal) some signal, but the radiated power from the antenna will be very much greater than that flowing through the pickle.
- awful 2y agoside comment; Cub Scout project books of the 1960s, as I recall, had you make a hot dog cooker by connecting line voltage to two nails through a board...
- SoftTalker 2y agoThere was actually a kitchen appliance that did this, we had one when I was a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=029jcmv4tIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=029jcmv4tIU
- awful 2y agoHaha; Thank You for sharing that.
- pacaro 2y agoThe tech trivia related to this that springs to mind is that the DEC Alpha processor was known internally by the code name EV, which stood for "Electric Vlasic" — although the suits backfit this in to "Extended VAX". (Vlasic is an American pickle brand.)
- dekhn 2y agowell, alan eustace who's on the DEC electropickle paper also worked on the alpha, I bet he suggestedit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jhallenworld 2y agoA thing that just happened in Boston is that Bloomberg swapped their relatively low power transmitters with iHeart's Alternative Rock 92.9. This is awesome for Bloomberg's reach, but it means that we now have an AM rock station, probably for the first time since the 1960s: 1330 AM. We'll see how long this lasts.. Red Hot Chili Peppers on AM right now..
- grugagag 2y agoIs pickle a new term for hot dogs? Probably similar conductors are congruent in this case, the heating/buring makes a lot of sense but what I wonder though is how it produces sound.
- fortran77 2y agoOn a related topic, they used to sell to consumers hot-dog cookers that just put mains voltage through a hot-dog. Here's Big Clive pumping 2x the rated volage through one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZZbuOeNmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZZbuOeNmw
- walrus01 2y agoAs a sort of a side note for everyone who thinks AM radio is dead as a useful medium, they've probably never lived and driven a car in a city that has: (a) a 50kW AM radio station with frequent and accurate traffic updates, often much better detail than what you can get from using google maps or waze or similar, and (b) massive, frequent traffic problems and congestion at major bridge and tunnel locations. It's still a very useful thing to have when driving and you don't need to take your eyes off the road at all.
- topspin 2y agoIn the taxonomy of RF circuits, the pickle is an (extremely inefficient) direct-conversion receiver. I've seen at least on video of this being done with a wrench, where the RF current forms a visible arc through the air to the wrench.
- pvaldes 2y agoSo, here I am, watching a sausage being tied and tortured until it starts to talk... I need to go sleep, definitely.