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TV detection

De_Bunk said:
They have a database of everyone who doesnt have a licence.

Then they go round to the house that doesnt have a licence registered and use a 'hand held' detector..and then they knock on the door...

They even have 4WD vehicles and motorcycles...

The vans are few and far between now...they only use them in high 'no licence' areas...

But the 'hand held' units are in full use...



DB
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Your evidence is still of the mythological variety. Anything more..."real" available?
 
Yes.
See http://www.tvlicensing.biz/detection/index.htm

Or Google TV detector oscillator (Restrict to UK pages for brevity).

But I repeat - the primary energy transmitted by a TV set is in two forms- sound and light. Anyone standing outside your house can tell if you have a TV on. No fancy equipment is required. If he has a copy of a database saying there is no TV Licence registered to your address, he knows you have a TV but no licence- unless he got it wrong as in Rat's case- which is why most TVLUK letters are addressed to "The occupant" .

At this point , your man calls in the dude with the detector, who can actually identify which channel you are watching- unless, like tkingdoll, you have the TV detuned and only watch vids on it.

(It's also tricky with blocks of flats.)

The whole thing is a farcical waste of public money.
 
Kimpatsu said:
Basically, a CRT monitor uses standardized frequencies to determine the colour of each pixel on the screen. A shortwave ariel can detect the localised EM field for each pixel, and by measuring its output recreate the colour. In this way, a map of what is on the screen can be built up, which means that you are basically viewing whatever's on the subject screen at the same time.
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Actually this is not correct. Color (or colour for those Brits) is determined by the phase of a common frequency. The phase is referenced to a standard 'burst' of frequency that last for a short time just after the horizontal synchronization pulse. For standard monochrome TV, which is what most people had in the 60's, the color frequency is non-existant. This method for color TV was developed and standardized in 1953 in the US of A and referred to as "NTSC" after the committed which authorized it's development, the "National Television System Commitee". In Europe colour television was not broadcast until 1967 in England and Germany with a slightly different method than the US standard, but basically the same idea.
 
CrossHair said:
This method for color TV was developed and standardized in 1953 in the US of A and referred to as "NTSC" after the committed which authorized it's development, the "National Television System Commitee".
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Well, you learn something new everyday. I always thought NTSC stood for "Never the Same Color Twice".
 
What's the license cost, anyway, and for how many channels?
 
roger said:
What's the license cost, anyway, and for how many channels?
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£126.50 per year. The BBC channels are the only ones that see any of the money, so I suppose strictly speaking the answer is "Two". Well, bit more than that now, there's 3 or 4 other BBC channels kicking around on digital now.

Loosely speaking the licence people don't really care whether you only watch the BBC or are common and watch ITV, so in reality it also gives you access to something like 30-odd channels (I'm counting freeview here). There are also third-party digital suppliers who will charge you a subscription to watch hundreds of the things. But even then you've got to have yer licence as well.
 
CrossHair said:
Actually this is not correct. Color (or colour for those Brits) is determined by the phase of a common frequency. The phase is referenced to a standard 'burst' of frequency that last for a short time just after the horizontal synchronization pulse. For standard monochrome TV, which is what most people had in the 60's, the color frequency is non-existant. This method for color TV was developed and standardized in 1953 in the US of A and referred to as "NTSC" after the committed which authorized it's development, the "National Television System Commitee". In Europe colour television was not broadcast until 1967 in England and Germany with a slightly different method than the US standard, but basically the same idea.
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So, they had TFTs in the 1960s...
Van Eck Phishing only works with modern flat screens, not those old-fashioned cluncky tube thingummies.
 
Van Ecke's original paper (1985??) refers to CRTs.


I'm curious about your earlier point- can an RF tuner card in a PC be detected by TV detectors? I doubt it myself, but the legal situation remains a grey area. If a PC is set up in hardware to perform as a TV, then in law it is a TV and a licence is required. But what if it picks up a BBC streamed news broadcast via a DSL broadband link? Technically, that's a telephone connection, not a TV, so no licence is needed, but the TVLUK (the "provisional wing of the BBC") is wording its advertising to scare people into thinking any pc capable of receiving any BBC output is in violation of the law. It's nasty. It's cheap . It's distasteful. I urinate upon their heads. May their camels die of thirst and their hard drives develop read errors.
 
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Soapy Sam said:
I'm curious about your earlier point- can an RF tuner card in a PC be detected by TV detectors? I doubt it myself, but the legal situation remains a grey area. If a PC is set up in hardware to perform as a TV, then in law it is a TV and a licence is required. But what if it picks up a BBC streamed news broadcast via a DSL broadband link? Technically, that's a telephone connection, not a TV, so no licence is needed, but the TVLUK (the "provisional wing of the BBC") is wording its advertising to scare people into thinking any pc capable of receiving any BBC output is in violation of the law. It's nasty. It's cheap . It's distasteful. I urinate upon their heads. May their camels die of thirst and their hard drives develop read errors.
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Yeah, TVLUK should be spelled with an "f", not an "l"...
I'd be interested in the test court case. Not least because I'm a British expat and can watch BBC newsclips for free on the BBC's own website (although they won't let me play interactive games with a non-British ISP).
The quality of their streams is pretty naff, though.
 
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