Receiving Radio with blades of grass

[The Bruce]

This was originally posted in the SoCal HAM section of this forum, but I'd thought I'd repost it here for entertainment value, so that others can chime in.

Apparently the people that recorded this video didn't get the memo on what high powered radio transmissions can do to their bodies when they hop over that boundary fence, lol. :blink:

http://youtu.be/6Scm-tKTHls

 

[RatsoW8]

Those silly Russians cooking their bodies for our entertainment. I wonder if they realized the weeds weren't the only thing they were burning up?

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

LOL Man that station had some power. Maybe it was a shortwave broadcaster but may have been regular AM band. I am not sure of the power limits in Russia. I used to work on 1 Kw AM towers while they were hot but you needed gloves and dry ground. The 10 Kw station I worked on was a bit trickier to work around. Just standing in the ATU hut you could get an RF tingle by brushing up against a grounded object lightly.At 1 Kw grass had no effect if it touched the tower base.

 

[Robb]

Kinda cool how that weed rectified/detected, amplified, and even transduced the signal.
All it needed was a volume control . . .

 

[jessejamesdallas]

Surprised one of them just didn't grab ahold of it with his bare hand...

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

Surprised one of them just didn't grab ahold of it with his bare hand...

That could have sealed his fate if he had. Assuming 50 ohms, which most towers are not at the base, 1 kw is about 220 volts of RF and 50 kw is about 1500 volts. God knows how much power that tower had. I know if one case where a broadcast engineer accidentally ended up across the feedpoint to the tower and died an agonizingly slow death until he was found.