General > General Technical Chat

For the countries which need Radio and TV licenses. How TV Detector Vans work...

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BrianHG:
Here in North America, I find this funny, but, here it is:


BrianHG:
I wonder what happened when home computers became a thing, but you never tuned into any over the air TV broadcasts...

Were people nailed for that?

langwadt:
we used to have a tv license, then it came a "media" license, meaning if you had either internet or tv you needed one. now it is just a tax because everyone need one anyway. But decades before that they they dropped the detector vans because pretty much everyone had a tv, so instead it made more sense to just go ask those that didn't have a license if they had a tv 

Stray Electron:
  AFIK the US has never required licensing of home TVs so the GOV didn't need to snoop for tax purposes but the TV networks did have at least one annual event where the networks wanted to see how many people where watching their shows (the bigger the audience, the more that they could charge the advertisers).  I was told that they used hundreds of vans that drove around with equipment that could monitor the IF frequency of people's TVs and from the frequency they could tell what channel you were watching. 

  Licenses are generally required for radio transmitters in the US and the FCC does monitor some transmitters but AFIK only when they they get a complaint about a specific person.  In that case they may send out a tam of investigators with whatever equipment that they need in order to investigate that specific allegation.

BrianHG:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on January 07, 2025, 06:37:15 pm ---  AFIK the US has never required licensing of home TVs so the GOV didn't need to snoop for tax purposes but the TV networks did have at least one annual event where the networks wanted to see how many people where watching their shows (the bigger the audience, the more that they could charge the advertisers).  I was told that they used hundreds of vans that drove around with equipment that could monitor the IF frequency of people's TVs and from the frequency they could tell what channel you were watching. 

  Licenses are generally required for radio transmitters in the US and the FCC does monitor some transmitters but AFIK only when they they get a complaint about a specific person.  In that case they may send out a tam of investigators with whatever equipment that they need in order to investigate that specific allegation.

--- End quote ---
They scanned for leakage from the LO (local oscillator) frequency.  In the US, the TV IF frequency is a fixed 45MHz.
These vans were replaced by Nielsen cable boxes which reported back to the cable companies which channels were being watched and when...

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