Turning Off TV

DoctorDowntime · Joined: 07 Aug 2005 Posts: 22 Location: California, USA

Greetings all,

In a recent TVBG newsletter, Mitch Altman discovered that the TVBG can even shoot through pockets in some cases. I thought I'd share my reply as an electronics security professional specializing in Infra-red beam protection systems to him (and to you all) so as to provide some support material for why this could happen, giving folks a new, stealthy method for using their TVBG (without having to build it into a hat, like I did). Here's what I wrote:

Hi Mitch,

Yes, you're right...the TVBG is even more powerful than previously imagined, and can indeed work through pockets! (Which was nice to discover, I'll bet!) But here's even more...

As a professional in the electronic security device industry (as I design security systems using encoded IR PE beams for high-profile clients all the time), I can also tell you that one reason why the TVBG works even through pockets is that IR signals only seem to require a small *fraction* of the encoded signal to get through in order to reach the receiver and have the desired effect.

In demos that we do for our security sensors, with an active transmitter-to-receiver pair, we often use a section of white, open-cell packing foam, to simulate extreme fog conditions (fog being the biggest killer of outdoor-mounted point-to-point photo-electric IR beam systems, cutting down the signal strength massively). The result is that the transmitted IR 940nM beam still permeates the foam and successfully and effectively reaches the receiver even down to a threshold value as low as 20%, before the signal reception becomes unstable!

So, this goes a long way to explain why the TVBG also works through pockets, as you've recently discovered...and thought you'd enjoy knowing that. Especially since folks using the TVBG now have a kind of stealth method of their own that everyone can use, if they fire it off within a pocket.

Keep up the good work, Mitch, and thanks for sharing that info!

~Jordan Avon

"Doctor Downtime"
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Doctor Downtime says:

"Turn it off, and go outside. Your Real World adventures await you!"
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