By Marklar
12.160 MHz
March, 04, 2009
To defeat the new HDTV digital converter box you essentially need to create an
RF shield around it. How do I know? Well, I have an associate’s degree in electronics and 16 years of experience in the field of electronics manufacturing. If an electrical or electronics engineer tells you I got something wrong in all of this, listen to them because I know what I’m talking about but they know it better.
So, back to that RF shield. More precisely we’ll be talking about building an extremely simple
Faraday cage around your HDTV converter box here. This is a fancy way of saying a grounded metal box around the converter box. The more conductive the metal is the better so copper would be great but thin sheet steal would work fine as well. Aluminum would not be good but better than nothing. A plastic box with a ferrous coating would work as well with no need for grounding but this is a bit on the prohibitively expensive side for many. Ferrous = some kind of ferrite (a type of iron that absorbs magnetic field energy).
So, the grounded metal box acts like a radio antenna turning the magnetic field that is being generated to an electrical energy that is harmlessly shunted (channeled) to ground via the ground wire effectively killing it. So the box has to be connected by a wire to that third prong hole on an outlet. This is Earth ground. In a home your copper plumbing pipe makes an excellent Earth ground as well.
I haven't seen one of the new converter boxes personally but I assume there is an infrared receiver window on it for the remote. You'd have to leave a hole in the box for the remote control to operate as well as a hole to run the cabling through it but there won't be enough signal leaking out of such holes to do any damage.
In the field, electronics can be made undetectable by military detection equipment (at least 80% of it) in this way as well. Just drive a 2 or 3 foot chunk of copper plumber’s pipe, or a copper rod into the literal ground and solder your ground wire to that for your Earth ground. This technique won't work for a broadcasting CB or shortwave radios of course but you'd be defeating the whole point of the device anyway. My opinion is listen, never broadcast except in an emergency and go OLD school using runners/couriers as a pony express of sorts. If you live in an area under control of friendly forces you can relax a bit but radio silence is always prudent when unnecessary.
This advice for masking “in the field” electronics is only relevant when in a rural area or truly out in “the sticks” where a radio signal of any kind is a distinct beacon. In the city or even a suburban area a piece of electronics equipment is already somewhat masked from detection by virtue of being “lost in the crowd.” A piece of electronics equipment powered and operating in the middle of a forest, however, is like painting a bull’s eye on your forehead.
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