A conversation with a friend made me suddenly recall that when I was a kid in the early 80’s, we could occasionally hear a faint rendition of the major local AM station coming from the faucet of the kitchen sink. We lived just a mile or two from the broadcast antenna.
It was very faint and had a spooky sizzling quality, but it was unmistakable. Our wall-mounted telephone also picked it up, but more distinctly. I can understand the telephone noise reason, as there’s an amplifier and speaker. But a faucet? How?
In: Physics
Metal in the pipes was acting as an antenna. It’s important to remember that radio signals and such are just waves producing the programming you hear. Very few of them are directed (especially in broadcasting, you want it to reach your whole market area) so they radiate outwards from the broadcast antenna and get picked up by anything that can receive it. So interestingly enough, the pipes did it.
If you put another broadcast antenna equidistant in the opposite direction and had it broadcast something, you’d probably hear both in the sink and it would seem garbled.
That’s the gist, I don’t mess around a lot with AM radio but from what I remember it’s the most “primitive” of broadcast technology and is on it’s way out besides localized broadcasts for stuff like weather. Somebody who deals more with radio’s will answer shortly I’m sure.
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