My edgey post on telling when the cameras and/or VCRs are on....

Note if it needs to be post-busted for creating a inference of advocating cheating I understand. I don't advocate cheating at all; some of you might even be techies that might find this handy:

The standard color burst for USA TV, as given in the NTSC standards is 3.579...Mhz. The standard color burst signal in PAL (European and British) is 3.818 Mhz. The standard range of internal fm sound, in a VCR is 68 MHZ using the almost universal Sony/Sanyo processing chips.

Take the target color burst signal frequency, which will be found on all TV cameras --even black and white ones (technical reasons having to do with generating the sycn signals. Subtract 455Khz AKA .455 Mhz. divide by aproximately 3 or 4, and subtract 455 Khz again. See if that dial position is occupied by any strong AM station nearby (location-wise).

Open a cheap Analog tuning walkman. Desolder or clip the leads to the bass -boost switch it likely has for use as an unobtrusive switch. Solder a coil made of 26 guage wire (such as the solid wire used in telephone lines left over when the telephone critter made a mess in your house). Wind about 18 turns over an ordinary AA battery spaced at about 1/4 the length.

Solder it to a 10-150 pico farad trimmer capacitor as small as you can find.

Now solder this assembly to one lead of the bass-boom switch. Solder the other end to one lead of the AM ferite rod antenna inside. Solder the remaining end of the switch to the other lead of the rod antenna.

You should be able to trim the new capacitor to pickup the color burst signal, on both European and US video cameras.

You can also do a fair amount of shortwave radio listening from about 3.2 Mhz to 9 Mhz.

There will be no outside indication of this modification, other than picking up shortwave if you click that Bass-boost switch on. You will need to have access to the new trimmer capicitor to get much use out of this for regular shortwave reception.

Total cost should be under $2 + the cost of the Analog Walkman type radio.

Use this only to detect attention to yourself and not with any idea of cheating please.

Interesting post.

" Use this only to detect attention to yourself and not with any idea of cheating please."

My question is how can detecting frequencies within a casino be used as a form of cheating? I dont see anyway one can benefit from this even if they were allowed to use the application.

Can you give me a clue?

thanks,
TG

Interesting post. But methinks it's somewhat useless. In my current position as a surveillance director, I have never been in any surveillance room where all cameras and vcr's were not in continous operation.

It would be better to know that all cameras and vcr's are recording all the time. The trick is knowing when someone is actually monitoring the activity (pro-active) versus reviewing tape after the fact (re-active).

.02 worth
PB

One example. Saw this on TV awhile back, a player next to the shooter on a crap table would take a couple of the shooter's chips every time the shooter would roll the dice. Nobody except the eye in the sky caught this.

You misunderstood my post, I mean other ways of using a radio that detects frequencies, a crazy example might be a video poker or slot machince that has a frequency range of X offers better odds and so forth.

(NT)

But supose also you were sitting and got a burst of video cameras being turned on.

I could show you how to use Van Eck monitoring of someone sitting in any video room, to literally video that room with no camera.

If you have ever had an appliance with one of those neon indicator lights you may have noticed that in the dark it might barely glow, while in a lit room it glows more. What is happening is that the neon bulb was more ionized from the room light, than the dark.

Well the same thing happens with a computer monitor. Each phosphor in the screen will give off an rf burst if light hits it. If you use usual Van Eck methods to reconstruct the video information being watched you substract by computer analysis the watched information, from the burst data, and you can literally video the video room. It is easier than you think. That is the detailed way to do things, just to show how well you can counter-spy!

The color burst signal off a video screen has a 15th harmonic component 3.579*15, in the middle of the lower VHF TV band, you can get a change in visual noise from a TV held hear the office. The presence of someone at the monitor will cause some flutter of the color burst component. It is the same as being in front of a ham QRP antenna. Well several hams actually have a color burst frequency net for communications. The same flutter, this time a sound, will be detectable, and pretty damn far away. See QST magazine for contests held by the color burst nets amoung hams!!!

I know you are there and all you have to go on is that a highroller has a walkman with him. Going near the cage, passing by the video room door....

Shielding can cut the pickup from the video room, but you cannot shield too well the pickup of the color burst from the cameras themselves. That said, a careful ear can still hear you being there, as I said above!!!!

PAL and SECAM use 4.33 MHz. color burst. The rest is usual typos--gotta be me! I won't burn their bandwidth but there are also interesting projects from thebest.net/wuggy/links.htm listed. There were several links for the original to this project: the Shortwave from a Flavor Radio, article that ran in one of the Gernsback (Popular Electronics etc.) mags, which is hard to trace the way they keep folding and joining and splitting titles. There are details on the methods, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that can even video the video room itself on one hacker site I won't give that I was part of about one year ago.