Just as you think you've exhausted the possibilities..another one come up.
Myself and my brother used to know, by reputation and through people my dad knew at the pub, a guy called A. The problem with A is he was 80% trufax, 20% bullshit.

A. was a jobbing electrician but also a once-upon-a-time roadie for Motorhead.

A. was a man who would put in a couple of extra sockets for you but would tell you about his time making spy bugs for MI5.

A. was organised enough to run a pirate radio station (he said) but would also wire his kettle leads into the socket using matchsticks to hold the bare wires in.

Herein I find the dichotomy. Fed on his matrix of truths and lies I learned to imagine I could do things beyond the norm if only I took a step out into a brave new world.

A. paid me to drive him to Bruntingthorpe for a project which turned out to be real, but also, A. told me the reason I had mains hum on a record deck was 'connection impedence' when it was actually zero earthing.

A. told me the A-level electronic systems project I'd shown him the plan for would fail because of phase shift problems when it was an analogue switch issue and not a clocked system.

A. denigrated me in front of mixed company that I'd never be able to detect a radio bug he'd installed (I had a scanner at the time) because of sideband suppression. He never installed one so I didn't rise to the challenge of trying to find something that didn't exist. But then he sold me a starburst semi-acoustic guitar body and neck for £25 and it was only my lack of doing anything about it that meant it never got used.

Meh. I think on the whole I benefitted from the relationship.

But by Christ, whenever you see him he's always just been involved in telecomunications projects for the Olympics and has a VOIP phone in his house which connects anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world and wirelessly but....

Shit, maybe he's less of a bullshitter than he used to be. But statistically it can't ALL be true. Can it?
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 14 Jan 2011, 1:36, 1 reply)

Well, the sidebands...
... are the bit that carries the information. You can suppress one, and the carrier - this is what "single sideband" is - but it makes everything sound funny because it's hard to get the pitch right when you receive. You have to tune the receiver very precisely to the transmitter. The transmitter needs to be quite big and complicated. If you're making a bug, it most likely uses FM which has got both its sidebands exactly where they ought to be, either side of the carrier.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideband
(gordonjcp, Fri 14 Jan 2011, 7:23, closed)