Noisy neighbor disruptor circuit

7/27/2011 1:28 AM EDT

Great Idea. I need a similar idea to cancel the noise constantly coming in through my bedroom window from the traffic of the nearby street. Can somebody suggest? The noise is really disturbing in summer as I cannot keep my windows closed.

7/27/2011 1:40 AM EDT

Texas Instruments has something to your needs. Its used to cancel out noise coming from the outside of the car or from the engine by sampling the noise and then sending a destructive sound wave in the opposing direction of the incident sound wave. Try looking in their automotive applications section. Hope this helps.

7/27/2011 1:58 AM EDT

Wonderful idea, but today the unit would probably be playing what is either on an iPod or streaming from the internet via computer. Much tougher to silence.

7/27/2011 12:49 PM EDT

Hi Fred, this is nice story, presenting a great idea generated from a scientific mind and a fantastic application...acted so quietly (where yelling did not work) but effectively!
Hope you had a great fun after your idea worked. Any more such electronic problem solvers?

7/27/2011 4:58 PM EDT

Unfortunately this is illegal. Federal law prohibits the operation of any type of jamming equipment.

7/27/2011 9:18 PM EDT

I recall a similar device, though I guess it would be called the Noisy Sister Disrupter Circuit, NSDC. At the time we had a table top AM radio in the kitchen that my sister would play loudly as she was just getting into rock and roll. I would be tring to get my homework done at the nearby dining room table. It was impossible.

Then, fate smiled upon me. For my sixth grade birthday, I received a Radio Shack 75 in 1 project kit. I put my windfall technology to good use, building the spark gap generator out of a relay, transformer coil, antenna coil, antenna, 9V batter, and switch. When the switch was depressed, the relay would rapidly open and close contact, and the antenna would emit rf. As the circuit description says, the generator "makes noise over the whole AM Radio band", which it did, much to this gradeschoolers delight! My sister could never figure out why the radio would start buzzing loudly all of a sudden, and finally she would turn it off in exasperation. No station worked. Thank goodness it was only an AM radio!

Of course having to tear down your existing project and wire up the spark gap generator was not always the quickest solution. I probably should have built a permanent spark-gap station, however, I found a much more low-tech way to disable the radio when I needed to. I just plugged in a short similar looking extension cord behind the radio. The radio appeared to be plugged in. It wasn't. Now and then the radio just didn't work for some reason. And sometimes it emitted a buzzing noise. Odd indeed! But whenever I played it, it worked perfectly, of course. The midas touch, as they say. In the mean time, I was able to get my homework done in peace and quiet.

What I really need now, though, is a way to silence the subwoofers going up and down the street. Any ideas?

7/28/2011 3:23 AM EDT

I met a woman who was having terrible problems with her teenage son playing loud music at all hours (he was special needs and violent, so traditional discipline was not a solution). I suggested she took the fuse out of the plug. She said this worked. (I don't know how long for, because fairly soon after he had to stop living with her anyway).

7/28/2011 4:18 AM EDT

Living with good freindship with neighbours solves all these kind of issues.

7/28/2011 9:55 AM EDT

I have really enjoyed spending some time here today remembering Bob Pease.

7/28/2011 11:59 AM EDT

I made an FM jammer like that for a security guard where I worked. Unfortunately it needed a bit more anteena gain, as it was effective in his room but not strong enough for the neighbor. And yes, of course these are illegal.

I almost completed an AM jammer for a friend (whose next-door neighbors would open their truck doors and blast music at high levels and higher distortions) which produced a carrier offset by 3kHz from the specific station. The antenna was a fairly large loop and series-resonated with an NP0 cap (which got quite warm!). It did some marvelous cross-modulation of the audio as well as generating the loud whine. But alas, before deployment in a concealed housing, the miscreants switched to cassettes. Sorry. Jamming that will hair-lip everybody in Bear Creek.

7/28/2011 10:05 PM EDT

A single spoonful of Coke(product of the CocaCola Company) will render a cassette unusable. There is a challenge of application, but it will work in a squirt gun, for a while. The various jammers are indeed very effective and illegal, so they should be built cheaply to allow them to be destroyed as a means of removing evidence. The Mobile Bass Boomers? I have not discovered a legal way to silence them, except for the police using the "loud muffler" law. That makes them be a bit quieter. Probably a two-pound hammer would also work, or reverse the DC supply polarity to their amplifier, after jumpering their DC line fuses.

7/29/2011 7:42 AM EDT

I had a crazy neighbor who set up his stereo in the garage and would turn it up very loud day and night. He had several broken windows, so it really kept us up. I hatched a plan. I had an old FM exciter, which is essentially a low power transmitter. I would record an hour of the station he was listening to, then play it back through the exciter, but at much lower volume. If he cranked the volume back up. I would wait a while, and then turn it off. The real station would then come through loud enough blow out his speakers. Unfortunately, the modulator section had failed. At least I had silence for a good while. He never figured out that he could just tune to another station.

7/29/2011 9:28 AM EDT

Wow...necessity really is the mother of invention, eh? I especially like MikeFlood's idea of jamming signals in places civilized folks want silence. Yes, yes, I know, highly illegal. Is it possible to jam cell calls but not text messages? hmmmmm

7/29/2011 3:46 PM EDT

A story from a 1950s Practical Wireless (a UK constructor's magazine) pops up. A chap bought a new signal generator, all valves and gorgeous vernier tuning, and spent a happy hour or so in his shack checking various radios and generally messing around. At one point, he had the Light Service of the BBC on 200kHz and heterodyned the output of the signal generator (coupled by a short length of wire) with the broadcast, making things fade in and out on ever longer cycles. The afternoon slipped away...

Three days later, he was talking to a friend from ten doors away. "You're a radio man," said the friend, "I don't suppose you were listening to the Light on Sunday afternoon? Most extraordinary problems they had with the transmitter. Things just kept fading in and out. I must write and ask what they were playing at..."

Our chap had nothing to say, but he did make a note to turn the wick down next time.

7/29/2011 4:06 PM EDT

A former co-worker had a problem with the neighbor upstairs from him in their apartment building back in the 70's. This guy would blast his stereo at high volume late at night with obnoxious thumpa-thumpa music. The victim got vengeance on him by going up into the attic of the building where the fuse panel was located. He somehow wired a huge 100 amp stud rectifier in series with his neighbor's wall outlet circuit. Since the offending stereo was built long before the days of cheap, quiet switching power supplies, it had a 60Hz stack-lam transformer. Needless to say, the transformer didn't last too long running on DC. For that matter, neither did his refrigerator. My friend removed the recifier, put the fuse back and sneaked back out of the attic. The puzzled noisy guy called his landlord, who called an electrician. Everything checked out OK. The electrician said that the toasted aplliances were due to some "bad electricity." Thomas Edison would be offended at somebody dissing DC like that.

7/29/2011 4:09 PM EDT

A number of years ago I was living in an apartment complex in Texas and had a neighbor like that. He would come home every summer night and open his patio doors (he had a ground floor on the pool deck. I had 2nd floor around the pool, about 30 feet from over top of him and around the corner, so I could get the full effect!) He would actually move one of his big tower speakers onto his patio and have the other one in the doorway and crank them full blast as he took a dip in the pool. Neighbors (myself included) would call the local PD and complain, but he would always have it turned back down and be sitting on his patio smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer when the cops showed up. Towards the end, they stopped showing up, just doing a 'drive by' as late as an hour after the call. Can't really blame them.

After almost 4 weeks of this, at least 4 to 5 nights per week, I'd had enough.

I had a Swan 500C ham radio transceiver. This thing would put OUT about 380watts of power into a dummy load on 40meters. I had run a length of rg-58 out through the wall in my bedroom where the old apartment complex antenna cable had been before they went cable. Outside my window was a downspout. I had spent a few months previously hooking into the spouting. First just connecting, then every couple of nights working further along and putting plastic cards under the 'comb' mounts and then under the hangers across the roof edge to insulate it. I think I had about 100 feet or more of spouting hooked up. With a tuner, I could get the Swan to tune up CAREFULLY as long as I kept the power way down, like under 50W.

7/29/2011 4:09 PM EDT

Part 2---

Well, that last night I powered up the Swan, and when I felt it was warmed up, I made sure it was set to to the antenna instead of the Heatkit dummy load and flipped the transceiver to 'tune'. I had never done that before, but I knew it was probably a bad thing.

Well, not bad for me. The blaring music suddenly changed to an incredibly load and raspy roar. I left it in tune for a few seconds, then flipped off. The music came back but it was raspy from the speaker cones mushrooming as the voice coils had bottomed out and now rubbing as the cone moved. Even when the idiot had turned down the stereo you could still hear the raspiness from the speakers...

Never had a problem again...

7/29/2011 4:14 PM EDT

Then, of course, there is the Widlar Hassler circuit, covered by EE Times just a couple of weeks ago. Since this forum nukes replies with HTML, just go to the National Semi webs site and search "What's All This Widlar Stuff, Anyhow?" I'd build one for my cubicle, but I work in a smoke alarm lab. What's the point?

7/29/2011 4:25 PM EDT

As others have commented, jamming a licensed radio station is illegal.

Another approach might have been to build an audio oscillator, feed it into your own high-power audio system, aim the speakers at the obnoxious neighbor, and blast her with a 10 kHz tone at high volume until she called for a truce. Of course, earplugs would be needed to preserve your own sanity :)

7/29/2011 4:27 PM EDT

At a company I worked for in the early 1970s, they had an FM radio playing over the P.A. system. Unfortunately, it was controlled by the secretaries who liked 'elevator music'.

I fired up our high frequency generator with a length of wire acting as an antenna and tuned it to the station the FM radio was tuned to. I found that if I slowly changed the generator frequency, I could 'pull' the FM radio to a new station. Due to the radio's AFC, it would lock on the new station.

This would work for a few hours until a secretary noticed and would tune the radio back to the original station. Of course, I would then 'pull' it again.

This went on for a few weeks until, one day, I noticed that the radio was off. I asked one of the secretaries why there was no music. The answer: 'The radio kept changing stations so we sent it out for repair.'

7/29/2011 4:28 PM EDT

I used this trick on my high school electronics teacher who was attempting to repair a radio. I just grabbed a test oscillator off the shelf. Every time that he got the radio tuned to a station, I faded his station out. He finally walked away and "repaired" the radio the next day.

7/29/2011 5:24 PM EDT

I had a chance to have a beer and meet Bob Pease at a conference here in Phoenix. We were discussing the boom-boom cars. He prefaced the discussion with "Well, of course it would be illegal, but I heard of this guy..." And went on to describe a neighborhood kid with a boom boom car and he would let it play parked. Approaching his dad did no good, so a circuit was built. A mic with a low pass filter attached to a spark gap transmitter and a very long antenna would clobber every TV and radio within a block. The interference 'seemed' synchronous with the bass track of that kid's car. He spent hundred$ adding filters and such. He finally turned it down when approaching home.

7/29/2011 11:09 PM EDT

Great stories! And a way that someone dealt with subwoofers!

StuMichaels' story reminds me of another incident. Our group had just moved from our old office area into an area of the building adjacent to a manufacturing line. The assemblers had a boom box that they played pretty loud--90's pop music, wafted through our cubicles. Well the same loud pop music got tiresome after awhile, and somebody got the idea of playing a little music of their own over their boombox using a high frequency generator, and modulating it with...Saturday Night Fever. So just as Celine Dione's It Was So Long Ago song would be getting to the "Baby! Baby! Baby!" part, you would suddenly hear this mysterious ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-da-ba... and Stayin' Alive would start up. "It's the Bee Gees again!", someone one line would frantically yell. Radio Bee Gees indeed! I guess it's better than an all Elvis station, though.

7/30/2011 5:41 PM EDT

I did the same thing in the early 80's when I was an RF Technician. The company's sig gen was DC to 1 GHz. I put a metal scribe in the output for the antenna and tuned it to the hard-rock frequency that coworkers loved.

As I increased amplitude the stereo volume would decrease. As the coworker increased the volume control I increased the sig gen amplitude until maximum was reached. Then I turned off the sig gen and the stereo blasted. This bothered the supervisor who made the coworker find a different station.

Problem solved.

8/1/2011 6:59 AM EDT

Although, or perhaps because, we were working in an electronics development lab at the time, a friend of mine back in the '50s opted to use low-tech retaliation. Well as domestic tape recorders were in their infancy then I suppose part of it could be regarded as high tech. His scheme was to suspend a length of steel pipe, hit it with a hammer, record the effect on an endless loop of tape, set it to full volume in an open window facing the offenders position and go out for several hours. It was totaly effective.

8/8/2011 4:44 PM EDT

In college, the campus radio station went off the air at midnight. At that time, they would rebroadcast a received feed from WMMR at the University of Pennsylvania down in Philly, about 60 miles away. Their reception antenna was on the top of the University Center.

One of the brothers realized how weak a signal they were receiving, and one Sunday morning about 3am he drove down the campus and from a hand FM mic wired to a tape deck, overrode WMMR and broadcast his own program from his VW parked just outside the center.

But it didn't stop there. Back at the frat, he had a 10 element Radio Shack FM beam antenna aimed at Philly. He swung it around to point at the UC and found he could easily override the weak signal from WMMR when he tapped in to the antenna with his FM wireless mic.

Needless to say, there were quite a few Saturday nights where WMMR was not heard, but instead a very risque program called the Catamites Corner replaced it...

(At the time, catamite was accepted in a lot of circles to mean any male slave purchased by wealthy Greek women for sexual perversions, NOT just the Olympian definition...)

5/6/2012 3:48 AM EDT

Hi,
I search something we can buy (all build) for "Noisy neighbor disruptor circuit".

Noise make me crazy and my neighborough is really a idiot.