The Problem With Being Technical

The Problem With Being Technical was Originally Posted on April 20, 2013 by lavarock

Having been involved with electronics most of my life, it is difficult to watch TV or movies without critiquing them.

Yes, the jet vapor trails in the sky bothered me in 1 Million Years BC (while others were watching Rachel Welch.

Although I was very interested in Mission Impossible and Hawaii 50 episodes when they were first broadcast, the technical items used were sometimes a distraction. In a Mission Impossible episode, they use a handheld device with an antenna and earphone to look for a hidden item. The unit they are using, I had one personally, was a signal strength meter from the 1960’s. It had a crystal in it and could decode AM radio signals and was not very sensitive. The TV show placed a piece of tape over the label and implied it was some special unit. Even if the mission group had rebuilt it, there was not enough room in the unit to do much more than it did in reality

Also, they showed a team member up on a telephone pole clipping test clips onto screw terminals. Telephone pole connections don’t use screw terminals, they would splice and crimp wires, but not use terminal blocks with screws.

Hawaii 50 (the original series) also had an episode where they are using radio direction finding to locate an evil person. We Hams are pretty good at tracking signals and in fact can be quite good at it. In the show it took them considerable time to track a signal within a 3 mile area when the guy was apparently transmitting continuously.

In our “fox hunts” we would have someone with a transmitter hide and the rest of us would try to locate him by using maps and radio receivers. Usually we could find someone in the county within an hour or two.

In this mentioned episode, the guy was calling from a pay phone from a shopping mall. In todays world, that phone would send a caller ID and be very easy to trace. A bad guy could route calls to hide the caller ID but it would take a sophisticated bad guy now-a-days to do that.

When it was new, I watched a Banecek episode where a computer was missing from a building. Seeing a telephone line go in, I figured the computer with all the blinking lights, was just a front and the computer was really far away. I was right.

So when I see a technical item, my mind starts clicking as I find I have to evaluate what I am seeing.