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The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

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Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#31

With some filtering on the output to knock down harmonics and aliasing noise, and as long as the power output is low enough, this could actually be legal in the US. IANAL, etc, but this is my understanding: It's actually ridiculously tricky to measure transmitter power output in the terms that the FCC regs are written in, but the rule of thumb is that, given the receiver sensitivity of a typical radio, if you lose th…

The main problem with this line of reasoning is that it neglects important parts defined elsewhere making it seem like this is legal when its not. IANAL, but I do hang out with a lot of hammies. You can't help but absorb a lot of technical stuff with them around. Like for example, https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/jammers It need not saturate the bands, you technically are in violation the moment a non-licensed e…

Eh, if they're so low power that they're not stepping on their neighbor's reception I'd personally say it's fine. Tree falling in the woods situation and all. That definitely varies based on where one is playing around with such things, and it's always important to understand how far your transmissions are actually going (which can be surprising if you don't have much experience with it!).

Someone in a shed on a few acres playing around with an SDR? Go ahead, I don't care. Playing around in an amateur anechoic chamber, have fun if you're sure you're containing things. On a desk in a random apartment in Manhattan? What an asshole, call the FCC.

Is it potentially against the law to do this? Yeah, probably. How bad is it? Somewhere around jaywalking on an absolutely empty street and dumping waste in a park, greatly depending on multiple factors.

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you wouldn't have needed to tune your car radio at all You still need to tune it but there are many "center frequencies" that can be tuned instead of just one. So, you wouldn't have to tune far but you would still have to tune :) If you had a knob like most radios in the 80's it would save you from cranking the knob several times to get the dial into the right range before fine-tuning.

I think the theory is that every car that has an FM radio has it tuned to something . So no matter what, as soon as you put on the FM radio, it would have the audio.

Yeah, until you have a 5 year old (probably me in this case in the 80s) that plays with random knobs on the dash when they get in the car. Is it volume? Is it the tuner? We’ll know once the car turns on!

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#34

With some filtering on the output to knock down harmonics and aliasing noise, and as long as the power output is low enough, this could actually be legal in the US. IANAL, etc, but this is my understanding: It's actually ridiculously tricky to measure transmitter power output in the terms that the FCC regs are written in, but the rule of thumb is that, given the receiver sensitivity of a typical radio, if you lose th…

The main problem with this line of reasoning is that it neglects important parts defined elsewhere making it seem like this is legal when its not. IANAL, but I do hang out with a lot of hammies. You can't help but absorb a lot of technical stuff with them around. Like for example, https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/jammers It need not saturate the bands, you technically are in violation the moment a non-licensed e…

For what it's worth (which isn't much), all of that hinges upon the FCC's motivation and capacity to enforce its rules.

If amateur and citizens band radio shenanigans over the last few decades have proved anything, it's that you have to be an absolutely massive pain in the radio-wave-receiving public's ass to really get their attention.

If you had this device on 14.300, 7.200, or channel 6? Meh. No one's gonna care.

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#35
Re: "I wrote a rational resampler which does this by upsampling, linear interpolating, and decimating to the target sample rate."

Where would you source Swifty music that wasn't already at 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample rates? Curiously, what sample rates were these at, and why?

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#36
> The Taylorator is a piece of software which allows me to flood the FM broadcast band with Taylor Swift's music.

You don’t need an SDR, just put on her song and most people at traffic lights will roll their windows up!

That being said, from my experience, power will be the deciding factor. I tried both LimeSDR and BladeRF, and when maxing out the power, they overheat really fast, so they probably will only work while driving/cycling so no obstacles. And then again, most people use Spotify or similar in their cars.

If it works on AM, however, that would be great to test.

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#37
Instead of struggling to generate this in real time, perhaps you could generate it in advance and loop it? The median Taylor Swift song is 3:52, then at 20M samples per second (and four bytes per sample) you need a little over 19GB [1] and I think streaming from SSD should be fast enough. Could probably also compress it.

[1] 20e6*(60*3+52)*4 / 1e9

Re: The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

#39
This is something that would fit right into some dystopian, proto-cyberpunk movie.

Like, a bunch of activists need to disable comms of some nightshift guards in an area. So... someone figures out how to put more juice into this thing to pump out music on all frequencies they could have.

Bonus points because this wouldn't just jam their communications with white noise. It would be confusing as hell. Taylor Swift on the main channel. Switch to the backup. Irish Folk. Switch to something you and Bob used some time back. Power Metal! What?

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