My uncle's 1980s ham radio trick debunked a local 'blackout' conspiracy last summer

Last June, my neighbor swore the power company was cutting the grid on purpose during heat waves... he had a whole theory about mind control. I got curious and set up an old Yaesu FT-101 my uncle left me, tuned to a NOAA weather frequency on 162.550 MHz... the static and chirps actually showed a transformer station 2 blocks over was just overloaded. The specific dropouts matched patterns in a 2018 utility report from the city of Austin I found online. Has anyone else used basic radio gear to check a wild theory against real data?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_hugo1mo ago

Heard about a buddy of mine down in San Antonio who did basically the same thing with a cheap SDR dongle and a laptop. He was convinced the streetlights in his neighborhood were syncing up with some new 5G tower they put in. Hooked up the software and started logging the radio noise around 700 MHz and 2.4 GHz. Turned out the lights had a faulty timer that was just set to the same time every night, nothing to do with the tower at all. Showed him the logs from the city's own streetlight maintenance page and he couldn't argue with it. Funny how a little bit of real data can shut down a wild story faster than anything else.

xenagarcia1mo agoMost Upvoted

Did he ever check if the timer logs matched up with the tower's signal patterns too?