85
The Story Of The Max Headroom Incident, America’s Creepiest Unsolved TV Hack
(allthatsinteresting.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
85 points (97.8% liked)
Unsolved Mysteries
814 readers
1 users here now
A community dedicated to unsolved crimes, disappearances, and other unexplained phenomena.
Post a writeup of the mystery, or a link to a blog article with a writeup on the mystery in question
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Eventually, the FCC worked out how the hacker had done it. By placing his or her own dish antenna between the transmitter tower, the hacker could have effectively interrupted the original signal. They wouldn’t even have needed expensive equipment, just good timing and positioning."
I don't understand this. Do they mean they put up a dish ON the transmitter tower and then overpowered the original transmitter? That would take seriously expensive equipment as those TV transmitter towers output a serious amount of power, a local station in my area broadcasts at 1000 kilowatts.
Reads to me like they set up a transmitter on the local network's recieving dish - acting as their feed.
My understanding was that there was a studio building with a low power transmitter, and the transmissions from that were broadcasted to the high power antenna which would then beam it out to consumers. By placing their dish between these two points, the hacker was able to overpower the signal to the antenna and insert their own video feed.