If you live in a mobile home they will not accept a reg no as an address.

If you live in a mobile home they will not accept a reg no as an address.

That's right. Also, a friend bought a TV a while back, gave an incorrect address to avoid the TV licencing people and then had a warranty claim a couple of days later cos it packed in on him. He wondered why the engineer didn't arrive to fix it when they said he was supposed to. That's right he went to the wrong address leaving my mate to explain the situation to the retailer and a neighbour that he doesn't exactly see eye to eye with.

steady on....how else will mr Woss get his

actually this isn't so. all superhetrodyne radio recievers emit a signal back through the aerial' date=' it because of the way that television signals are decoded by the television. because the tv has a superhet reciever it produces a signal which is a sine wave 39.5Mhz lower than the recieved tv signal, it does this to increase the quality of the signal. now the two signals are now mixed together to get what called the 'intermediate signal', because of the way the signals are mixed and because of the amount of gain added to the signal some of it is induced back into the aerial and it acts like a mini-transmitter, and becuause the frequency emmited is different for every channel they can even tell what channel you are watching. it is around 754Mhz for BB1 and around 802Mhz for BB2

so basically everything with a tv reciever(including a PC card tv thingy) can be detected. large or small.

but this signal only transmits for a very short range. and also it dosn't apply to digital terestrial signals because these are all broadcast of the same frequency.[/quote']

This all sounds very familiar, the detecter vans can see your receivers IF as it goes back up the ariel. The vans are real, but they work off the afore mentioned database to start with as it

I don't pay a TV licence

But I do have to suffer adverts every ten minutes!

HAM or Radio/TV Engineer???

no, i know a fair old bit about electronics though. i havn't really explained properly how the superhet reciever works becuase i tried to simplify it for people to understand.

i learned lots about radios, they are fairly simple devices really, did you know that an ordinary fm radio reciever that you can buy almost and shop on earth can be modified to 'listen in' to certain other braoadcasts?? police even?? all you need to do in most cases is change 2 components. nomally just a reisitor and a capacator.

They cant prosecute/fine you for a first offence. Must send a warning first!

I was fairly certain that the TV detectors used pcik up resonant frequencies from the tuner device.

If thats correct they can pick up anything with a tuner in it.

I got really annoyed at them once as I kept getting letters each one being more threatening and kept writing back saying i don't have a TV. Eventually i called them and said look send your guy around or stop sending me letters. I did point out that they constitiuted harassment under UK law and I would have a lawyer onto them if i got any more.

I don't think they were to impressed that the only name i would give them was "The Occupier" as they kept addressing their letters to that person.

I think due to the unique way that the bbc is funded that you do need a license to listen to the radio in the car

Think again, the radio licence was abolished in 1972.

IIRC the Beeb agreed a licence fee rise with the home office and absorbed the Radio licence into the TV licence as it was reasoned that anybody with a telly would almost certainly have a radio and most likely radio owners, would have a telly.

Also' date=' theres a scheme where i think by law, Retailers have to keep a record of names and addresses of customers who buy anything that can recive a TV signal... i had to fill a tv-licencing form in when i bought a new DVB reciver for my pc.

i guess its a step in the right direction.. if they put 2+2 together.... automatic fine maybe?[/quote']

I bought our telly in asda and didn't have to fill anything in!

no' date=' i know a fair old bit about electronics though. i havn't really explained properly how the superhet reciever works becuase i tried to simplify it for people to understand.

i learned lots about radios, they are fairly simple devices really, did you know that an ordinary fm radio reciever that you can buy almost and shop on earth can be modified to [b']'listen in' to certain other braoadcasts?? police even?? all you need to do in most cases is change 2 components. nomally just a reisitor and a capacator.[/b]

Do tell me more...!!

IIRC the TV license was introduced a tax on the luxury (as it was then) of operating a TV set. The BBC was the only broadcaster and needed funding from somewhere so the tax revenue was handed over to the BBC. But, it does not necessarily to be so any more than road fund license gets spent on road maintenance or duty on alcohol gets spent on upkeep of pubs - i.e. it's all income for the treasury which should spend as it sees fit, taxes can't be mapped to areas of expenditure otherwise you would have a 'child tax' to pay for schools, a 'granny tax' for each surviving grandparent to pay for pensions etc. For today's situation where everyone has a TV and the BBC are responsible for a minority of the scheduling the licence is completely unjustifiable, particularly as it non-progressive and enforcement disproportionately targets the poorest of society.

I think it is the only tax in the country that is collected by the same body that it funds? If HMRC were given carte blanche to go after every instance of tax evasion in the same way that TV licensing authority do in order to increase their own budget, they would have an inspector permanently stationed in every minicab, kitchen and building site in the country. What really grinds my gears is the 'guilty until proven innocent' method of licence enforcement

Don’t forget you can choose not to have a TV and not pay the licence. I have said this before, but you will pay at least twice as much per annum to Independent TV companies that you do to the BBC. You pay for SKY, CH4, CH5 and ITV etc every time you purchase a product which has been advertised on TV. The charge is included in the purchase price of your chosen item eg a couple of pence on the price of a child’s toy, a penny on a box of chocolates Also the Holding companys will spread these costs around. Asda, Morrisons, Sainsburys etc don’t get their TV advertising for free. Unless you are self sufficient you can not avoid these costs sadly. The Beeb gives you the choice at least.

A friend of ours who lives in a valley in Perthshire cannot receive terrestrial TV. He has, among others, a Sky dish.

He took the BBC to court and lost over having to pay a TV licence.

Do tell me more...!!

if you want to modify a radio to pick up "other" broadcasts i suggest you get a book about radio recievers out from the library or something... they normally have all the formulas for working out the tuned frequencies in them somewhere...

A friend of ours who lives in a valley in Perthshire cannot receive terrestrial TV. He has' date=' among others, a Sky dish.

He took the BBC to court and lost over having to pay a TV licence.[/quote']

I live in a valley that cannot recieve either radio or terrestrial TV, (strangely we do recieve the automatic clock signal though?)

Obviously we have Sky but we also have a basic cable system (nothing like NTL etc) it is basically just a load of Sky boxes in a hut at the top of the hill that are all tuned to different stations, these are then re-broadcast via a cable in VHF format to the houses. they use VHF so that you either buy a tv from them that can recieve it, or a convertor that only they sell localy to UHF.

Having worked in the industry it took less than a minute for me to get all our tv's showing cable without paying them a bean for it!!

I've also been known to sneak up to the hut with a peice of highly technical equipment and change the channel on some of the boxes to more interesting channels than 'Performance' or 'classical music' (all a bit posh round here). whats the technical bit of equipment I hear you ask?..........

My Sky remote!! it is awkward to avoid changing them all to the same channel though!

Anyway the main point is that whatever method you use to recieve tv signals, you are going to be receiving the BBC so you must pay the licence as it's not included in your sky bill etc.

I remember a story my grandparents told me once, when ITV was launched, my Gran's sister sent a letter to them saying she diddnt like the content and asked if they could stop sending it to her house

I remember a story my grandparents told me once, when ITV was launched, my Gran's sister sent a letter to them saying she diddnt like the content and asked if they could stop sending it to her house

yeah, we dont want any of those new fangled air waves coming to this part of town!!

Do tell me more...!!

eg this to modify a cheap radio to things you are allowed to listen to:

http://www.hanssummers.com/radio/superdrg/

and the latest version

http://www.hanssummers.com/radio/superdrg2/index.htm

Poundshop radio:

http://www.hanssummers.com/radio/poundshop/index.htm

Hours of fun...

Hotels used to use VHF modulators for the movie channels on the tellys. The vision engineers I used to work with would smuggle VHF sets from work (only small ones naturally) in to the rooms and hey presto free movies

Hotels used to use VHF modulators for the movie channels on the tellys. The vision engineers I used to work with would smuggle VHF sets from work (only small ones naturally) in to the rooms and hey presto free movies

In terms of picking up a CRT's tv or computer picture is something that has been worried about for a long time, something called TEMPEST (http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/tempest.html)

may sound far fetched but is very real, a crt tv for example will radiate the information being trasmitted down the acceleration tube, if you use a very broadband and very sensitive antenna it is possible to pick up these signals, once you figure out at what rate to decode at

(50/60/100hz) you can then observe what is being displayed on the orginal display. cool eh?,

and I believe it applies to LCD and Plasma

and I believe it applies to LCD and Plasma

not lcd but possible on plasma..... i would have to read up on plasma screens to give you an answer to that!!

it is possible on LCD just not as easy as the emmissions are burried deep inside the noise floor, dont you just love the properties of RF and Electromagnetic emissions