Sunday, January 25, 2009

Microwave meter videos

I made a few videos of the simple microwave / 2.4GHz meter dealing with work office's microwave oven--woe be unto whomever hangs around the hinge.

The first is a full examination of the space of the microwave oven, and is entirely inappropriate for those with short attention spans (stick to the second video, you).



This one is a short proof the detection is when the microwave oven is busily heating my hot water for tea.



The other amazing news is there is a very strong microwave signal that the northwest corner of the roof of Ryerson intercepts that appears to be coming from either the Admin building or the hospital: it strongly peaks in the southwest direction, almost pegs the meter on the 200mV scale, and when I added a headphone to the meter I could audibly hear some sort of signal that reminded me of a TV video sync noise.
What is this signal? Am I hearing a horizontal sync? Or is there some other signal that has a repetitive sync noise that runs at 12-18 kilohertz?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nifty. And yeah, it's probably the hospital.

Back in '00 or so we rigged up the old satellite dish atop KPTC for 21cm, and a bunch of high school students spent a few evenings mapping the Milky Way. We noticed back then that there was a bright source coming from the general direction of the hospital tower (which visibly has antennas coming out of it). Since 21cm itself is quiet per FCC, even granted our probably very crappy band selectivity, it must have been pretty bright to leak into our detector that strongly. Then again, we were probably looking down the barrel of a microwave relay or cell tower or similar, so that's pretty much what you'd expect.

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Cool! Thanks for the info. I suspect if we get funding for our proposed radio astronomy project, we'll spend as much as needed in selectivity to kill the interference.
I'd love to hear any more info you have on the radio astronomy stuff!