To be fair TV detector vans actually did exist in the early days of TV, there were just barely any of them because they were expensive and they were just as eff

To be fair TV detector vans actually did exist in the early days of TV, there were just barely any of them because they were expensive and they were just as effective as psychological tactic. The idea was that old televisions would radiate the local oscillator frequency used in the superheterodyne circuit strongly enough it was detectable from the street, where it could be direction-found from the van outside. Ringway Manchester has a decent video on the subject. This wouldn't work nowadays for obvious reasons, but they still pretend the vans are a thing as far as I know.