Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 19 November 2008, 2:28 PM
Mysterious black radio ops in London
I didn't have a chance to count them, nor take a picture, but they were arranged in a rectilinear array in what looked like a 4x3 or 5x4 configuration - so there were probably between twelve and twenty of them. They were very short, black and stubby, which means they were operating in very high UHF or low microwave bands - I'd say somewhere between 3 and 6 GHz.
This wouldn't be a direction-finding array: you only need four antennae for that, arranged in a square. It looked for all the world like some sort of very large MIMO system - but much larger than any I've seen proposed for mobile data.
Does anyone know what, who, when and why? Have there been any other sightings? Informed guesses or random ideas more than welcome: meanwhile, I'll do some research among my more radioactive pals and see if clues are forthcoming.
PreviousComments on this post
Hmmm......could it fire radio waves at comuters and servers and create an image of what's stored on the drives?
Seriously though I've put it out there so I'll share what I get back.
edit/ one answer came back as "collecting mobile or wireless data coverage"
If radio waves were fired up into the ionosphere with enough intensity, and the ionosphere could be pushed up, the resulting vacum effect would cause air to rush in and fill the gap thus gaining the people with the antennae the ability to control the weather to some degree. Could be the local weather support ops. Think this is silly? then check out what the U.S. military are up to in Alaska with the "H.A.A.R.P" project. Although no mention of weather modification is made on the official site, there is in the video!
Oh, don't get me started about HAARP. It attracts some of the very premium thinkers of the tin-foil hat brigade. There are plenty of odd and untalked about things that HAARP could be testing, but weather modification?
And if you were going to be producing the sort of power required in a car, then feeding it into a set of (what I assume are) something like 5/8 wave whips, all you'll be able to do is cook, fry and boil passers-by - all the radiation comes out of the side. And yourself - HAARP is megawatts upon megawatts, which means you'll have to have some sort of pocket nuke in there with you.
Exciting, if true!
I jested about the harp!.... how about a tetra mast tester/data fed back to central control for calibration purposes?
Ah...a mystery person got back to me and suggested that "it was a bunch of posers with a pimped up car" So I suppose the antenna could have been fake, how about that then?
I do like the scanning the drives idea, although I expect this may be tricky when they are spinning.
Its a diversity antenna array for reading multi-path reception of WiMax/Mimo cell sites. It could also be used for studies of GPS reception. I suppose it could be used to DF a "pirate" wireless cell site. I like the fact that they did it all up in black, that probably got your interest quicker than if they plastered an advertising broadside all over the car and painted it bright green! An attempt to be subtle that turned out not.
Ya'll could blame Google except it didn't sound like it had cameras this time! More fun than UFO sightings.
I did wonder about some sort of network mapper/coverage analysis, but I can't see what advantage there is to a huge array of antennas over one or two. You'd rather have something that reflected the sort of terminal in normal use. It could be measuring something unusual in a novel way, certainly, but I can't think what. Characterising radio coverage is a pretty well mapped art: there's not much you need to know that you can't find out in the good old fashioned way.
But then, using the theory that you test as closely as you can to reality, what application could possibly use that sort of array? It would have to be vehicular, it would have to be high bandwidth, and you'd want that sort of gain (which could be very high) if you were installing a large network where base station costs were high.
So, one starts to think, who's got a high bandwidth application with a nationwide reach but no existing base stations? The only contender I can come up with is Qualcomm, which recently bought a chunk of UK L band (1.5 GHz-ish) and has a mobile TV technology (MediaFLO) but no mast-sharing agreements with existing operators. It might be thinking that digital in-car telly/radio is a good idea... although there's still a lot wrong with that picture.
As for the poseurs with the pimpmobile... well, yes, perhaps. But a Ford Mondeo?
One final thought - when I talked to Intel last about the future of radio, they said that one of the things they'd found was that as they pushed the technology into new areas - massively MIMO, 60GHz and above, extreme bandwidths and so on - they were finding that things worked, but not as they expected. Existing models of how radio works become not so much wrong as missing the point: effects that have little or no impact on current systems, and are largely ignored by current models, become much more important. So the chances of my mystery mobile measuring a Rumsfeld 'unknown unknown' can't be ignored.
Investigation continues!
It's certainly a diversity/MIMO array (diversity reception, despite being a WWII vintage technology, is after all a very early form of MIMO. Well, MI at least), and it could be mapping WiMAX coverage, but it seems overkill for that.
Hey don't knock the mondeo! They are very highly respected amongst petrol heads(just ask Mr Clarkson), will rev freely up to 6500 rpm, run with practically no oil, do 40 mpg (approaching prius figures all round) and are very hard to break. If you look hard there are mk1s knocking around with close to half a million miles on the clock.
Rooftop quoits?
And pour quoits pas?
Hmm lotss of angry horses me thinks.
