A faulty TV digibox sparked a rescue mission from RAF Kinloss by sending out a signal identical to those transmitted by vessels in distress. The Kinloss site in Moray, which co-ordinates rescue operations across the UK, detected an "SOS" call from the Portsmouth area on 5 January. A coastguard helicopter spent two hours searching the harbour area before the signal was traced to dry land. Coming to you live from the Department of WTF... We have a set-top "Digibox" broadcasting not just an SOS, but on an emergency channel, too. The odds? Roughly 1 in 14 million, not counting the fact that a Digibox shouldn't be broadcasting in the first place. BBC has the details.
Hmmm...technology gone haywire, or someone monkeying around trying to see what they could do with it? And how the **** is a STB broadcasting a signal?!
Well, it's not really a signal the way most people would think of it. All that it was doing was emitting RF radiation at 121.5 Mhz which is the international distress frequeuency. 121.5 is close to the VHF TV band and so a bad component could easily cause radiation at that freq. Keep oin mind that most set-top boxes convert the signal from whatever frequency it arrives in to the TV VHF band that the TV actually sees, so what was probably happening was a component had come out of calibration and it was converting to the wrong freq. THis happened in the US as well a few years ago.
But I'm suprised that the signal was strong enough to be pick up by the helicopter. Because as far as I can follow you, it won't have a proper antena.
unless it was propigating allong any number of copper wires that run arround the house OR it was being sent back up the TV aerial. All an antena is is a piece of wire cut at the corrent length (one half/one quater of the wavelength) so anything can become it. Also the box is being powered from the mains. Thats an awful lot of power right there! so its enirely feasable that the box was able to broadcast on that frequency over long distances. IMHO i think that the box was tampered with as the probability of it of sending a signal at all is IMMENCLY low.
