[78-L] Double turntable turns 60 next week

[Michael Biel]

On 3/21/2012 8:51 AM, Anthony G Pavick wrote:
> Not sure if this is exactly the same thing, but look at item 20 about
> halfway down this page:
>
> http://www.radiojamming.puslapiai.lt/photo.htm
>
> Is this a dual tonearm turntable being used to produce audio 'mush'
> to jam radio transmssions? T

It could be used this way by giving a pair of audio signals from the 
same recording to make a more complicated but possibly "honest" 
interference, although it could be used one arm at a time to make it 
continuous.   My surprise in these photos is that they used this kind of 
sound source for jamming.  I heard thousands of famming signals over 
several decades and most sounded like buzzsaws with occasional morse 
code-like beeping to make the supposedly stupid listeners to think 
theywerehear interference by ham operators.  I don't think the turntable 
woiuld be used live -- it would make a master tape that would be looped.

The photos were very interesting because I visited a transmission site 
in the Eastern edge of Moscow in 1995 that is rumored to have been a 
jamming facility.  It then was the site of many local entertainment 
stations, including an FM station which had four hours of English 
programming in the morning and then in the evening.  The evening DJ was 
Vasili Strelnikov who had been the first rock DJ on Radio Moscow in the 
Gorbachov years.   The station owner insisted that the jamming legend 
was not true.  I took many pictures and videotape there -- and thought 
that I was headed straight to the Gulag when a security guy came up to 
me while photographing!!

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com