[sudo-discuss] Radio: Internet radio is about to get borked; just say CONELRAD.

Tue Nov 5 08:47:55 PST 2013

Re. CONELRAD:

Interesting stuff. A bit more digging and I did find reference to the low
power mode, and stations near the designated frequencies needing to retune
their transmitters. One article said that it took the engineer of one
station up to an hour to retune to the new frequency. Hope those bombers
were flying pretty slow. The round robin thing is also referenced in
several articles and how turning the transmitters on and off, as well as
transmitting off frequency (which I guess causes a high VSWR).

Sounds like a scam to sell lots of replacement power tubes for transmitters.

I like the idea of "Civil Disobedience IS Civil Defense!" and adopting the
symbol..

As for getting this to be an electoral issue, I have my doubts that you can
get a significant number of voters interested enough to care, until it is
too late.

-steve

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 6:48 AM, GtwoG PublicOhOne <g2g-public01 at att.net>wrote:

>
> Re. Steve:
>
> The nightmare scenario for "after the end of net neutrality" is that the
> Bigs adopt _time-based_ or _QOS-based_ control of any content that isn't
> paying through the nose.
>
> For example a typical small biz website's main page is about 2 meg.  Under
> the new regime they find it takes 60 seconds to load (long enough to chase
> away customers), so they redo the site and now it's only 200K.  But the
> 200K version of the page still takes 60 seconds to load.  And if they
> slimmed it down to 20K it would still take 60 seconds to load.
>
> Even easier, just assign the lowest QOS priorities to "commoner" traffic,
> so it's totally unreliable.  Think call-drops in bad cell coverage areas,
> translated to the entirety of the internet over both wired and wireless
> media, so it becomes totally but randomly useless.  The reason you hear
> people say they "don't like to talk on the phone" is because "the phone"
> has become crappy audio and unreliable connections compared to what it used
> to be.  Translate that to the whole internet with the exception of the
> "preferred channels," Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and of course Fox
> News.  "I don't go online any more except to buy stuff...."  Right, exactly.
>
> Either of the above would shut down internet broadcasting, and also shut
> down small business websites, for which reason Main Street USA ought to be
> up in arms about it, pitchforks & torches included.
>
> If either of those censorship-by-"nudge" things happens, a huge explosion
> of pirate radio would not be unexpected, including deliberately stepping on
> big stations' signals to make the point.  For that matter, revenge-jamming
> of the entire AM & FM broadcast bands by "outlaws" is a foreseeable
> consequence.  Think of people running around dropping off disposable
> jamming transmitters all over a city, that kind of thing.  Argh...
>
> What I'm thinking is:
>
> Make this THE issue of the 2014 Congressional elections.  "The biggest
> free speech issue of the 21st century."  Every candidate gets grilled on
> it: where do you stand on net neutrality?  Anyone who isn't with us gets
> dragged through a nasty primary battle.  And if they lie about supporting
> it, and get into office and do nothing or worse, then they get primaried in
> 2016, which will be a high-turnout year.
>
> And of course, back up the electoral strategy with a barrage of lawsuits
> covering every possible angle, and with peaceful civil disobedience
> designed to generate more trials where these issues can be brought up again
> and again and again.
>
> Re. CONELRAD:
>
> I've read plenty of Civil Defense material from the Cold War era and it
> described the low-power broadcast scenario.  That Wikipedia article is the
> first I've heard of anything like round-robin, and it would be difficult to
> manage a round-robin system in the middle of a nuclear attack.
>
> But either scenario might be adaptable to "modern conditions."  "Civil
> Disobedience IS Civil Defense!"  Heh, may as well adopt the CONELRAD symbol
> to go along with it, as a national logo for free radio.
>
> -G.
>
>
> =====
>
>
>
>
>
> On 13-11-04-Mon 10:46 PM, Steve Berl wrote:
>
> According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONELRAD the stations on
> other frequencies than 640 and 1240kHz shut down and the stations that
> normally broadcast at 640 and 1240 took turns round robin style
> transmitting.
>
>  So nobody switched frequencies or went to lower power.
>
>  As someone who has actually navigated a boat by AM band RDF I can say it
> would be very frustration if the transmitters kept moving around. It would
> definitely make it harder to find targets in the pre-GPS world.
>
>  Too bad about net neutrality. This might really suck.
>
>  Steve
>
> On Monday, November 4, 2013, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Federal circuit court in DC is set to rule on net neutrality and appears
>> poised to strike it down.
>>
>>
>> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/so-the-internets-about-to-lose-its-net-neutrality/
>>
>> That means say byebye to internet radio.  Small-scale community
>> netcasters won't be able to "negotiate" fees with The Bigs to get access,
>> even at speeds that are common today in residential broadband.
>>
>> If that occurs, it strengthens the moral justification for pirate radio
>> and similar solutions, by a decimal place or two.  In the spirit of which...
>>
>> ...anyone here ever hear of CONELRAD?
>>
>> That was the late 1950s - early 1960s plan for Civil Defense emergency
>> broadcasting in the event of nuclear war.  All FM stations would go off the
>> air, and AM stations would switch over to low-power broadcast on 640 KHz
>> and 1240 KHz.  Incoming Soviet bombers (in the pre-ICBM era) would be
>> unable to use RDF (radio direction finding) to navigate, while citizens
>> could pick up the emergency stations that were nearest to them.  Radio
>> dials were marked with little triangles at 640 and 1240 to make the
>> CONELRAD broadcasts easy to find.
>>
>> The signal interference issues Anthony and others brought up, must have
>> been addressed during the design of the CONELRAD system.  If nothing else,
>> AM reception is more directional, and the lower frequencies (kilohertz
>> rather than megahertz) would reduce the problems of signal synchronization,
>> including during times when official announcements were being broadcast
>> simultaneously over all the stations in a region.
>>
>> If this is the case, then blanket coverage by low-power AM transmitters
>> might be technically feasible.
>>
>> -G
>>
>>
>> =====
>>
>>
>> On 13-11-04-Mon 2:17 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
>>
>>  There would be a moire pattern of regions of roughly the dimensions of
>> a wavelength (~3 meters) within which interference would be mainly
>> constructive or mainly destructive. Reception would suck or not exist in
>> all the regions where interference was not constructive. Then the usual
>> multi-path interference issues. Complicated and a good reason to keep
>> transmitters well spaced-out. To do this right you are pretty much building
>> a phased-array antenna which uses the interference intentionally to aim the
>> beam by varying the synchronization among the signals from the different
>> antennas and that is way too complicated for this - you have to track the
>> location of the receivers somehow for one thing, and that's just the
>> beginning.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 2:01 PM, David Keenan <dkeenan44 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Also - this is a really dumb question but in terms of interference, I
>>> actually have no idea what sort of interference results when two
>>> coverage-adjacent radios are broadcasting the exact same signal? Does it
>>> make any difference if they'd both be broadcasting the same signal? I
>>> should remember this, since I actually took one of those AARL tests wayyy
>>> back when (and I think I am technically FCC licensed, at least for certain
>>> spectrums like SSB? Can't exactly remember..i should have a certificate
>>> somewhere)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> -steve
>
>
>

-- 
-steve
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