Real friends dont let friends eat plasma pickles, JEFF. I may never recover. Also, love your cut of the event. We both came to really similar conclusions to the foldback event and shorting to ground!
Ha! Next time we'll add some more seasoning to cover up the taste of copper! Be sure to check out Jay's video: ruclips.net/video/NowhPAMDOTo/видео.html
@@GeerlingEngineering I think that watching someone fry whilst channeling a Taylor Swift's 'Shake it off' would be in equal parts Totally Horrific and Absolutely Hilarious!
@GeerlingEngineering there's a video I've been looking for for a few years now. It shows a ham radio antenna frying a pvc pipe. It's freaking insane!! Lol
Ex-Nautel employee here. We'd run our transmitters at full power into a dummy load, and have holes drilled in the outside of the hardline coax going between the two that we'd stick a screwdriver through to dead short the transmitter output. They could shrug off that kind of abuse just fine, so they can handle pretty much anything else. Transmitters have to handle all sorts of high SWR conditions anyway - lightning strikes, ATU fires, tower collapses, copper thieves... guess we can add "weirdos with a pickle on a stick" to the list.
RF burns are weird. I forgot my radio was transmitting 100W WSPR and did a little tug on my random wire to see much much it was sagging. Felt like I had put my hand into a hornets nest. Little white dots appeared instantly in few places. Funny thing is that the burns looked insignificant in their appearance but oh boy did they hurt long afterwards. And they took almost half a year to disappear. And that only with 100W on upper HF!
interesting you sustained an rf burn at 100w, i have been old numerous times anything over 50w is considered dangerous, will have to be careful with my setup, sometimes crank 3300 watts into my sky stick. i guess i don't spoon with it so should be fine.
@@thearchitect4726 I've got few small burns with 50W also. Tho they felt more like something between a wasp sting and a mosquito sting. Mild, but the small white burn dot didn't disapper for the next 3 months
@@OH8EFI will have to move my 9 foot stanless to the roof of my 4wd when dxing. How close can i get to the antenna while transmitting with around 300w ssb?
I can still feel the rf burn I got 25 years ago, and that was just 30W of SSB. That part of my finger is kinda flatter, and the sense of touch and pain just doesn't work quite right.
Can be used as a method of hair removal (called thermolysis), but those devices are just 7.5W, also use point effect to isolate the energy to the base of the hair follicle.
I knew an Air Force veteran who had received a severe RF burn when a piece of equipment he was working on was energized. He said after a few moments of confusion the pain caused him to fall off the equipment and he didn't realize how badly the fall injured him until he tried to get up. Said the burn had all of his attention.
At least I know in a pinch I can cook a sausage with a pole and a ground rod from outside the fence. Wonder if we can do marshmallows and corn on the cob.
That German joke really was the wurst. 😉 Any listeners notice the brief drop in output? Or is just normal for AM radio to do that in 2024, with all our switching power supplies and giant electrical substations?
As a German myself I can confirm that 5:57 is actually really good. I used to operate an small am pirate station (relatively simple self build transmitter with 807 power amp tube). It outputted maybe 50W. I remamber it hurting really bad when I touched the antenna. The main problem was that I never had access to an tower or high point to mount the antenna wire at. It was just a few meters above the ground. The other problem was that no one in Germany listened to am radio, even 25 years ago. Everybody wanted fm.
When I was just 8 years old, Me and the other boys used to go to the back of the city out in the wetlands in Menlo Park, Ca. There lays an AM transmitter on 1420 KHz and one day we were there, and I had touched the metal bar on the antenna structure, and it gave me the worse electrocution shot/Burn I have ever seen, hell yeah that damn thing has burned my thumb to the bone. I'm glad that I didn't have the chance to grab it with the palm of my hand, just the thumb touched it and it all went bad from there. I cried like hell because it just kept on hurting and hurting as time went on.
Ive had somewhere up to 100 watts up my finger before and it was one of the worst sensations ive ever experienced. I had a faulty antenna and i hit the atu tune button on my ham radio and got a blast from the metalwork of the amplifier chassis. I was operating from a vehicle at the time and ill never forget the feeling like being stung by a thousand wasps on the inside of my hand and arm all at the same time. It hurt for a couple of days.
I had a similar experience poking a capacitor in the output stage of an EW transmitter. The pain was very intense, and it left an imprint of the capacitor on the tip of me finger. I'm obviously a slow learner because I did it again five minutes later.
I was the one or was one of the commenters that asked about how it would affect the reflected power (VSWR). Thank for showing it. I have had an RF burn on my right index finger and it's not fun!
I love this channel for many reasons. Here's one: I've worked with electronics since the early '70s, and back then I used to live about two miles straight-line distance from that radio station transmitter. I played around with CB radios, and discovered that if I keyed up my CB without a microphone by using a jumper lead, and then held the mic input lead in my fingers, it would transmit a perfectly modulated audio of that radio station through the CB. Thanks for the fun and educational video!
Came for the SBCs, stayed for sausage and pickle cooking with an AM transmission tower. Seriously: the mind-blowing thing for me is that these things being cooked actually emits the sound of the broadcast!
There used to be a high power SW station not too far from here where not only did residents in the nearest village complain that they car key fobs wouldn't work bit that they could hear Russian coming out of their toasters! This was at Rampisham Down, one of the sites the BBC built for the world service and had multiple 300kW and 500kW SW transmitters going into an impressive curtain antenna array that co ered a good few acres. Hate to think what the erp was if some the transmiiters themselves were 500kW output.
Stay away from towers. Unless the chief engineer is too old to change the tower light. My big adventure as the president of the local RACES (radio amateur civil emergency service) was to climb a 202 foot tall AM tower and replace the top light. No ladder. Jumped on the tower from a pickup truck. Marked it off my bucket list. (1993). I worked at that station for 7 years, part time on the weekends, and board oping high school football games. Afterwords I was the night DJ “RF Burns”.
Thanks for working with RACES. In my early days a lot of older engineers did some maintenance on hot towers either using a tower climber or a "helper". I bet there are a couple other interesting stories in those 7 years!
@@radijoe actually yes. Here is one more. He took the snow cat up the mountain, and after completing his work on some microwaves, and maintenance for “other agencies”, he discovered that he forgot to turn off the headlights on the snow cat. Dead battery. I had access to a 1965 Dodge pickup. 4WD. With a spare battery, jumper cables, and a board member, I went up the mountain. The drifts were above the windshield in some places, and the snow was above the hood. By the time I got to him, the board member had freaked out and was ready to go back. The truck has overheated, so I had to get all the snow out of the radiator. We all lived to see another day. 10745 ft. at summit.
So is the tower itself actually part of the driven radiating element? I guess as the wavelength being so long it must be like that but what I can't seem to see is a high voltage insulator at the base. And a inductance somewhere for matching?
@@jagmarc I think there is a lump of ceramic insulator between the base of the metal tower, and the concrete block with ground straps. Then a metal rod coming in from the side to feed the RF signal to the tower.
This is next level production values on this video, puts traditional TV shows to shame, It could be forgiven for mistaking this for a discovery channel show.
0:41 As a blacksmith I have hurt and burnt myself so many times in so many ways, but today I found out there is a new type of burn called Radio Frequency Burn. It's the burn that will sing to you. 🤯
Holy crap! I've lived in St Charles for a long time and I always figured that old radio tower was defunct lol. I never bothered to tune in to that frequency.
I never met a radio engineer who enjoyed doing something this off the wall. Thanks, this was a lot of fun to watch and informative at the same time. Long Live AM.
@@GeerlingEngineeringThere’s a form of brain surgery used for mild, benign tumors or sometimes, for (very much elective and seldom used) alternatives to the lobotomy (targeting only specific pathways) used for people with severe ocd who tried everything else. It’s called gamma knife. A cone-shaped beam of gamma rays is projected and the convergence is hot enough to burn out the brain tissue.
Yup they basically cook tissue in the atrium of the heart near the puminary veins to prevent left atrial fibrillation They put a low powered RF antenna in a catheter and administer 50W or so for a couple seconds.😮
@@christopherleubner6633 This technique is also used on various other parts of the body as well. My wife suffers from back pain and it was used to fry some of the nerves they thought were causing the pain. We are still dealing with complications from this procedure.
I had an RFA done on my thoracic spine without anesthesia. It hurt like hell, but the doctor kept me going through the last few seconds of agony. He did burn off a nerve root, but not the right one unfortunately. 73
But, we need you to do this @ night time. Pickles are actually nocturnal, the best ones to get are deli barrel pickles. Although you can get by with Claussen pickles are uncooked and are typically located in the refrigerated section of grocery stores. Cooked or Uncooked matters. 😂❤
Serious question that ive always wondered about. In theory, if you were to run and jump, and hug the AM tower, would you still get an RF burn since you yourself arent referenced to ground at that point?? KC1CQO
You wouldn't get the same RF burn, and it might not even give a tingle... however, at higher power levels towers still have different voltage potentials at different points, so it's still risky. Some tower climbers (traditionally, at least) would have the engineer put the tower at a lower power level and jump over to the tower to change lights. I don't think I'd do that, and I'm guessing it's not permitted most places, but that would normally result in no burns, assuming a good clean jump and no slipping off the tower!
The bandwidth is easy to explain. It's a trig identity that when you multiply two sinusoidal frequencies together (which is partially how AM works), you get signals at the sum and difference of your frequencies. This gives you the double sidebands.
Transmitter metering responds in interesting ways to reflected power. So, an increase in indicated power without a change in signal strength (via the FIM) during a high VSWR event would not be unusual. Thanks for doing this fun experiment!
Our nations radio networks are simply amazing. What a fortunate opportunity for the public to see a glimpse of the physics that connects us. And hopefully people learn to stay away from towers and how to not die if they find themselves near one.
Absolutely great stuff guys. I love AM radio but the commercials as of the last 10 years is staggering. Love to hear more music on AM like it used to be. You could hear a good station belting out tunes for a thousand miles. Can't do that with FM. Really miss the old days on AM. Thanks for posting. P.S. Notice how dead the grass is around that tower.
Nah just imagine the station just started playing talking heads psycho killer "I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire Psycho Killer Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
For this site, there's a locked gate at the entrance, a locked fence surrounding the entire field (with RF danger signs around it), and then locked fences around all the towers as well. It's also far off the beaten path (though some home builders have been adding subdivisions a mile or so away-until recently it was rural for miles around). There's only so much you can do for remote tower installations, but hopefully someone sees this video and understands it's not a good idea to play around this much RF!
People in 1924: We'll have global communications to share ideas and better society. People in 2024: We have global communications to cook food on an AM tower for youtube lulz.
Im @ 4:35... I'm guessing that the pickle was just too conductive, and stole most of the power as a short circuit, instead of burning away as a plasma and producing sound.
Next time you're thinking about doing this, I'd also suggest considering the possible damage to the structure - burning off any anticorrosion coating (paint?) on it and coating it in corrosion-promoting salty/acidic solutions, maybe even pitting from local arcing?
Fascinating stuff. I think the corn dog did so well due to all of the oil in its coating. The tower leg was definitely becoming more resistive with the carbon building up on it. We did the electric pickle at a concert venue a couple of times and the secret there is a small board with two hefty nails that go into the ends of the pickle (I guess in this configuration you'd have an anode nail (the drain) and the cathode (the source - touched to the tower) - do it at night and you'll definitely get plasma in the pickle that will mimic the audio going through it. Loved this video! 🫡 👍
To more completely answer the question about what happens to the energy when shorting to ground potential: Think about all the heat and smoke you’re generating by burning the hotdogs… mainly it’s going into heating the meat. Some may be re-radiated in RF frequency ranges, yet not efficiently or effectively. More effective is the re-radiating as sound energy through the “plasma speaker” and into the air. Also, don’t forget that dirt is actually a rather poor conductor, and not much current is flowing directly through the dirt. For more on myth-busting the ground / dirt ideas… see Bill Whitlock’s papers and presentations on the topic. One in particular where he talks about the non-involvement of the earth grounding rods to residential AC fault currents is actually up here on RUclips in a video titled “Bill Whitlock - Signal Interfaces Debunked - 4/27/2021”. At about 38 minutes in is where he starts talking about the relevant physics and concepts involved.
So a bit ago I learned that carrier current broadcasting is a way of broadcasting AM without a license, but there isn't a lot of practical knowledge out there on how it's actually done. Might be a good topic for a future video
So the dog acts as a detector. I guess the power flow is flucting and the heating effect is also changing and generating the sound waves. You can cook hot dogs with 120 VAC directly on the line. In the 60's you could buy electric hot dog cookers. Or you can put nails in each end and hook to the line.
@@GeerlingEngineering Ya. The ones they sold had an interlocked cooker. But I wonder about chemicals for the electrodes. The FDA may have shut it down. Once upon a time long long ago I worked on technology that killed microorganisms in food using high electric fields and we had to pass FDA muster.
It was the Presto Hot Dogger. I had one in college; this was before cheap microwave ovens. They worked fine, except the ends tasted metallic. You could cook six hot dogs (in parallel) in 60 seconds.
EXCELLENT CONTENT. Note his distance from the tower...for a reason. And note the hot dog and pickle are grounded, not his end of the pole. And avoid even touching a fence around a BC antenna tower. Theres no guarantee each wire is grounded. The tx wont much notice. The current shunts cores (?) are showing up " hot"! Foldback? I assume the power drop was active foldback in the PA and not just RF dissipation?
PS as to arcing, similar happens at the top of the tower with corona discharge which is also RF energy, just not necessarily the same frequency nor from the PA. Cirona vaporizes a corona hat eventually.
Yep, the Transmitter/PA stage was hitting current limiting protections, according to Nautel design engineers performing as designed-and apparently they've done much more extreme tests on their transmitters, shorting the path even closer to the transmitter to ground!
Please explain how the Hi-Z conductor (hot dog, pickle, brat) acts as a demodulator for the signal. I think it has something to do with the resistance of the material, but I'd love to hear from the RF engineer.
the pickle was very conductive, causing a short, as i think its called the brine juice in pickling vinegar and salt plus pickle stuff, i would say that acts as an electrolyte adding to the conductivity of the pickle. just a thought at 1.49AM.
I have a plasma globe. The kind you can get online or in a novelty store very cheaply. I've noticed if I put a penny on top of the glass dome, I can draw a small arc (maybe half a millimetre) from the penny to my finger which burns the outermost layer of my skin. What kind of burn is this please? Plasma? Electrical? RF? I'm curious.
So, I recently heard about the 2004 Smokey the Bear Ballon Incident where a hot air balloon, crashed into the KKOB Radio Towers. Now the people who where in the basket of the Ballon were safe and they started to climb down. The engineers immediately turned of the Antennas but in the news segment on KATV stated that the people who were climbing down were safe if the Antenna was on until they step foot on ground. Everyone did survive but I still have questions. Im not 100% sure but if the Antenna was still on when they got on it, why didn't they get hirt. Why if they step foot on the ground would they have possibly died due to being exposed to the energy of the tower?
Depends on the specifics, but that seems to be a 50kW tower. They would at minimum get a very decent RF burn unless they jumped off the tower as far from it as they could! If you ever find yourself on an energized tower, best bet is to call the engineering staff and have them turn it off before attempting the dismount!
From the comments, a few people have had RF burns. Is there any difference between an RF burn and a burn from a high voltage electric shock? Maybe it's just surviving and telling the tale?
There is! For one, RF burns don't seem to affect muscle quite the same, and is more like an internal flame path... I think it's something we may discuss more in a future video.
Did that with a Continental Doherty modulated 10 KW AM. The Continental didn't care what the load was, would not fold back on you like that. The Continental is still there as an aux because when there's lightning or something goes sideways with the DA, I can switch to the aux and stay on the air.
9:50 - It's 10x the strength of a typical microwave oven,in terms of RF power. It's a much lower frequency,though. And yes,RF burns suck in a different kind of way..high voltage,high frequency (relatively) energy is "different". It feels different,and behaves differently.
Found a neat Final Cut Pro plugin called Keyper, I used that on my Dad (didn't use the greenscreen for him, oops!), but it has little blotches on hair and motion. The lighting in my studio space is soooo nice for an even green screen for keying out-didn't have to do much tweaking to get almost a perfect matte!
Damn I was playing around one of these as a kid in a place we broke into…. Glad we didn’t climb it, never knew, there wasn’t a single sign warning us either
Many towers aren't AM, or energized (they just have antennas mounted at the top), so those towers wouldn't fry you while touching the base. Always better to just not touch them at all, but some towers are less dangerous than others (but all should have warning signs, even if they're completely off-they can receive enough energy to give you a nice shock, in certain scenarios, especially if grounding systems are broken).
It may have something to do with the chemical composition of the pickle changing upon ignition from the RF. It would be interesting also to study RF propagation across different chemical mediums.
Real friends dont let friends eat plasma pickles, JEFF. I may never recover. Also, love your cut of the event. We both came to really similar conclusions to the foldback event and shorting to ground!
Ha! Next time we'll add some more seasoning to cover up the taste of copper!
Be sure to check out Jay's video: ruclips.net/video/NowhPAMDOTo/видео.html
you should be selling that "plasma pickle" as merch!
@@GeerlingEngineering I think that watching someone fry whilst channeling a Taylor Swift's 'Shake it off' would be in equal parts Totally Horrific and Absolutely Hilarious!
Messing with a pickle and antenna tower, it will get ya in a pickle real quick. hehe
@GeerlingEngineering there's a video I've been looking for for a few years now. It shows a ham radio antenna frying a pvc pipe. It's freaking insane!! Lol
Ex-Nautel employee here. We'd run our transmitters at full power into a dummy load, and have holes drilled in the outside of the hardline coax going between the two that we'd stick a screwdriver through to dead short the transmitter output. They could shrug off that kind of abuse just fine, so they can handle pretty much anything else.
Transmitters have to handle all sorts of high SWR conditions anyway - lightning strikes, ATU fires, tower collapses, copper thieves... guess we can add "weirdos with a pickle on a stick" to the list.
Ooh... now I *know* we need to find a way to visit the Nautel HQ - would love to participate in some of this testing :)
@@GeerlingEngineering Maybe you should get together with Jeff Dunham to try a Jalapeno on a stick - to see if it translates to Spanish. LOL
Would love to see this in a datasheet: "Grounded pickle on tower: Indefinite"
This is by far the best comment posted in the best way for this pickle-tickular situation.
Thank you for your service, in every conceivable way.
Heck just disconnecting the cable from the antenna does the same thing as a dead short. RF is a strange animal.
“Don’t try this at home” Ok, there’s a 50KW AM station near me, I’ll try it there!
Noooo!! Haha, just follow the advice right at the end
I tried it at home with a 100w ham station and I do not recommend
@@binky_bun smoky finals huh?
@@binky_bun Did you use ham for testing the ham station conductivity?
@@binky_bunDid you blow anything in the process?
RF burns are weird. I forgot my radio was transmitting 100W WSPR and did a little tug on my random wire to see much much it was sagging. Felt like I had put my hand into a hornets nest. Little white dots appeared instantly in few places. Funny thing is that the burns looked insignificant in their appearance but oh boy did they hurt long afterwards. And they took almost half a year to disappear. And that only with 100W on upper HF!
Ouch! Glad they did at least disappear at some point!
Glad you told us, I'm always tempted to touch my LPFM Radiator
interesting you sustained an rf burn at 100w, i have been old numerous times anything over 50w is considered dangerous, will have to be careful with my setup, sometimes crank 3300 watts into my sky stick. i guess i don't spoon with it so should be fine.
@@thearchitect4726 I've got few small burns with 50W also. Tho they felt more like something between a wasp sting and a mosquito sting. Mild, but the small white burn dot didn't disapper for the next 3 months
@@OH8EFI will have to move my 9 foot stanless to the roof of my 4wd when dxing. How close can i get to the antenna while transmitting with around 300w ssb?
Yes, RF burns hurt.. It's a mix of feeling like you're both burning and being electrocuted at the same time.
I can still feel the rf burn I got 25 years ago, and that was just 30W of SSB. That part of my finger is kinda flatter, and the sense of touch and pain just doesn't work quite right.
Can be used as a method of hair removal (called thermolysis), but those devices are just 7.5W, also use point effect to isolate the energy to the base of the hair follicle.
I knew an Air Force veteran who had received a severe RF burn when a piece of equipment he was working on was energized. He said after a few moments of confusion the pain caused him to fall off the equipment and he didn't realize how badly the fall injured him until he tried to get up. Said the burn had all of his attention.
Sound like the perfect replacement for electric chairs. lol
@@BillAntStar Spangled Banner playing while cooking...
The corn dog makes an excellent speaker/conductor!
Appreciated the strong dad-joke energy of this video.
I think that insulating layer of delicious breading makes the fine plasma modulation zone.
the pickle: "why have you done this to us?!"
The movie Sausage Party (2016) comes to mind
@@bartgreftethe comment is the first time that film has come to my mind since I heard of it (2016) and hopefully the last!
@@mavfan1oh? Well then; did you hear about the sequel tv series that just came out on Amazon Prime? Supposedly it's just as raunchy.
😂
"AM breakfast sausage" 😆
It will greatly multiply your pain!
Is this like ham radio?
'...that's the AM breakfast water'
I am so glad the rusted 4 foot fence is there to keep everyone safe.
It’s all Darwin once you cross the fence :-)
@@chuckfarley7642There’s a backlog of Darwin Awards that need to be handed out. Let nature take its course.
That fence is only there to keep people honest. Kinda like the saying "that locked door you just kicked in was there for your protection, not mine"
At least I know in a pinch I can cook a sausage with a pole and a ground rod from outside the fence. Wonder if we can do marshmallows and corn on the cob.
When the bratwurst was in contact with the antena the radio host started speaking german 😆
Perfect timing
That was most definitely the joke lol
😂😂😂 Ich hoffe es war keine original Thüringer Bratwurst
Dann hätte der einen komischen Akzent gehabt. Genauso wie mit einer Weißwurst. Will man sich nicht antun
Your dad is cool.
When can we have meshtastic radios that transmit sound when I touch it with a wiener?
That German joke really was the wurst. 😉 Any listeners notice the brief drop in output? Or is just normal for AM radio to do that in 2024, with all our switching power supplies and giant electrical substations?
- Colleagues, we have high VSWR, do we have issues with the feeder or the antenna?
- No, just a sausage and pickle testing.
- Ah, the Geerlings, cool.
-No, just a family cookout.
I love the videos you and your dad make... Like, it just makes my day! Thanks guys.
8:28 "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing"
Yo, I think that sausage has gone bad.
8:25
As a German myself I can confirm that 5:57 is actually really good.
I used to operate an small am pirate station (relatively simple self build transmitter with 807 power amp tube). It outputted maybe 50W. I remamber it hurting really bad when I touched the antenna. The main problem was that I never had access to an tower or high point to mount the antenna wire at. It was just a few meters above the ground. The other problem was that no one in Germany listened to am radio, even 25 years ago. Everybody wanted fm.
When I was just 8 years old, Me and the other boys used to go to the back of the city out in the wetlands in Menlo Park, Ca.
There lays an AM transmitter on 1420 KHz and one day we were there, and I had touched the metal bar on the antenna structure, and it gave me the worse electrocution shot/Burn I have ever seen, hell yeah that damn thing has burned my thumb to the bone.
I'm glad that I didn't have the chance to grab it with the palm of my hand, just the thumb touched it and it all went bad from there.
I cried like hell because it just kept on hurting and hurting as time went on.
Ouch! Hopefully at least some healing over time. RF burns sound like a very bad time.
Are you talking about the towers by the Dumbarton Bridge..?
Absolutely fantastic! Hope this turns into a 1 mil vid!
Ha, thanks!
As a German, I like the Bratwurst thing.
Your dad is a legend and very educational. They don't make 'em like that anymore. I vote we see more of him imparting his wisdom!
Ive had somewhere up to 100 watts up my finger before and it was one of the worst sensations ive ever experienced. I had a faulty antenna and i hit the atu tune button on my ham radio and got a blast from the metalwork of the amplifier chassis. I was operating from a vehicle at the time and ill never forget the feeling like being stung by a thousand wasps on the inside of my hand and arm all at the same time. It hurt for a couple of days.
I had a similar experience poking a capacitor in the output stage of an EW transmitter. The pain was very intense, and it left an imprint of the capacitor on the tip of me finger. I'm obviously a slow learner because I did it again five minutes later.
Ouch! From all I've heard of RF burns, I am more scared of an unattached antenna than most other things I see in radio...
The pickle is mostly saltwater so it’s likely a better conductor than the hotdogs. That may be why it got more fold back.
Acetic acid in vinegar also increases the available ions for conduction. Good point on fold back.
I was the one or was one of the commenters that asked about how it would affect the reflected power (VSWR). Thank for showing it.
I have had an RF burn on my right index finger and it's not fun!
2:20 “WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO US” is exactly what I would expect the pickle to say if it could talk
Finally another plasma pickle and high voltage hot dog! The Christian radio station has a pickle preacher. So many veggietales jokes here, love it
I love this channel for many reasons. Here's one:
I've worked with electronics since the early '70s, and back then I used to live about two miles straight-line distance from that radio station transmitter. I played around with CB radios, and discovered that if I keyed up my CB without a microphone by using a jumper lead, and then held the mic input lead in my fingers, it would transmit a perfectly modulated audio of that radio station through the CB.
Thanks for the fun and educational video!
OMG... LMAO!! @ 2:20 that poor pickle screamed out "WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO US?!?!?!" 😂😂🤣🤣
Thank you, Geerlings, for doing this at home so I don't have to. The talking hot dog was wonderful!
Came for the SBCs, stayed for sausage and pickle cooking with an AM transmission tower.
Seriously: the mind-blowing thing for me is that these things being cooked actually emits the sound of the broadcast!
There used to be a high power SW station not too far from here where not only did residents in the nearest village complain that they car key fobs wouldn't work bit that they could hear Russian coming out of their toasters!
This was at Rampisham Down, one of the sites the BBC built for the world service and had multiple 300kW and 500kW SW transmitters going into an impressive curtain antenna array that co ered a good few acres. Hate to think what the erp was if some the transmiiters themselves were 500kW output.
Stay away from towers. Unless the chief engineer is too old to change the tower light. My big adventure as the president of the local RACES (radio amateur civil emergency service) was to climb a 202 foot tall AM tower and replace the top light. No ladder. Jumped on the tower from a pickup truck. Marked it off my bucket list. (1993). I worked at that station for 7 years, part time on the weekends, and board oping high school football games. Afterwords I was the night DJ “RF Burns”.
Thanks for working with RACES. In my early days a lot of older engineers did some maintenance on hot towers either using a tower climber or a "helper". I bet there are a couple other interesting stories in those 7 years!
@@radijoe actually yes. Here is one more. He took the snow cat up the mountain, and after completing his work on some microwaves, and maintenance for “other agencies”, he discovered that he forgot to turn off the headlights on the snow cat. Dead battery.
I had access to a 1965 Dodge pickup. 4WD.
With a spare battery, jumper cables, and a board member, I went up the mountain. The drifts were above the windshield in some places, and the snow was above the hood. By the time I got to him, the board member had freaked out and was ready to go back. The truck has overheated, so I had to get all the snow out of the radiator. We all lived to see another day. 10745 ft. at summit.
That's friggin awesome lol
So is the tower itself actually part of the driven radiating element? I guess as the wavelength being so long it must be like that but what I can't seem to see is a high voltage insulator at the base. And a inductance somewhere for matching?
@@jagmarc I think there is a lump of ceramic insulator between the base of the metal tower, and the concrete block with ground straps. Then a metal rod coming in from the side to feed the RF signal to the tower.
I love you and your dad! Love your channel also, keep it up!
This is next level production values on this video, puts traditional TV shows to shame, It could be forgiven for mistaking this for a discovery channel show.
0:41 As a blacksmith I have hurt and burnt myself so many times in so many ways, but today I found out there is a new type of burn called Radio Frequency Burn.
It's the burn that will sing to you. 🤯
Holy crap! I've lived in St Charles for a long time and I always figured that old radio tower was defunct lol. I never bothered to tune in to that frequency.
Pickle: starts talking
Nerds: its aliiive...ITS ALLLIIIIVE! ITS ALLLLLIIIIIVE!
The fold back was impressive, fun video to watch.
2700 V0LTS..UPPER WRIST TO FOR FINGER,THOUGHT BLEW MY HAND OFF.GREAT VIDEO,THANK YOU FOR THE SMILES..
Ow! Glad you're smiling!
I never met a radio engineer who enjoyed doing something this off the wall. Thanks, this was a lot of fun to watch and informative at the same time. Long Live AM.
My wife had a minor surgical procedure called an RF Ablation. When She told me about it this is what came to mind.
Oh my! I hope they were a little more precise in their application of RF energy than we were here...
@@GeerlingEngineeringThere’s a form of brain surgery used for mild, benign tumors or sometimes, for (very much elective and seldom used) alternatives to the lobotomy (targeting only specific pathways) used for people with severe ocd who tried everything else. It’s called gamma knife. A cone-shaped beam of gamma rays is projected and the convergence is hot enough to burn out the brain tissue.
Yup they basically cook tissue in the atrium of the heart near the puminary veins to prevent left atrial fibrillation They put a low powered RF antenna in a catheter and administer 50W or so for a couple seconds.😮
@@christopherleubner6633 This technique is also used on various other parts of the body as well. My wife suffers from back pain and it was used to fry some of the nerves they thought were causing the pain. We are still dealing with complications from this procedure.
I had an RFA done on my thoracic spine without anesthesia. It hurt like hell, but the doctor kept me going through the last few seconds of agony.
He did burn off a nerve root, but not the right one unfortunately.
73
Tangential, those eclipse photos you have in the background are beautiful!
Thanks! I have a video about the eclipse experience over on my main @JeffGeerling channel
12:04 "..wurst variable resistor..."
But, we need you to do this @ night time. Pickles are actually nocturnal, the best ones to get are deli barrel pickles. Although you can get by with Claussen pickles are uncooked and are typically located in the refrigerated section of grocery stores. Cooked or Uncooked matters.
😂❤
4:07 the pickle speaks out against the horrific things these guys are doing to food in the name of science
Serious question that ive always wondered about. In theory, if you were to run and jump, and hug the AM tower, would you still get an RF burn since you yourself arent referenced to ground at that point??
KC1CQO
You wouldn't get the same RF burn, and it might not even give a tingle... however, at higher power levels towers still have different voltage potentials at different points, so it's still risky.
Some tower climbers (traditionally, at least) would have the engineer put the tower at a lower power level and jump over to the tower to change lights. I don't think I'd do that, and I'm guessing it's not permitted most places, but that would normally result in no burns, assuming a good clean jump and no slipping off the tower!
@@JeffGeerling Thanks!!!! Very cool!
GUTEN MORGEN MEINE KINDER, GUTEN MORGEN !
Totally got me xD
Yeah, and now it's actually morning here in good old Germany! 😁
The bandwidth is easy to explain. It's a trig identity that when you multiply two sinusoidal frequencies together (which is partially how AM works), you get signals at the sum and difference of your frequencies. This gives you the double sidebands.
never in my life I thought I would hear a pickle say ”why have you done this to us”
Thank you and your wonderful father for the fun science experiment ... Loved it and I wont be climbing any type of towers ...
Transmitter metering responds in interesting ways to reflected power. So, an increase in indicated power without a change in signal strength (via the FIM) during a high VSWR event would not be unusual. Thanks for doing this fun experiment!
Our nations radio networks are simply amazing. What a fortunate opportunity for the public to see a glimpse of the physics that connects us. And hopefully people learn to stay away from towers and how to not die if they find themselves near one.
Absolutely great stuff guys. I love AM radio but the commercials as of the last 10 years is staggering. Love to hear more music on AM like it used to be. You could hear a good station belting out tunes for a thousand miles. Can't do that with FM. Really miss the old days on AM. Thanks for posting. P.S. Notice how dead the grass is around that tower.
Imagine watching your hand melt while a radio channel plays from it. New fear unlocked.
Nah just imagine the station just started playing talking heads psycho killer
"I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire
Psycho Killer
Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
The fence is a bit low to protect stupid from itself
For this site, there's a locked gate at the entrance, a locked fence surrounding the entire field (with RF danger signs around it), and then locked fences around all the towers as well. It's also far off the beaten path (though some home builders have been adding subdivisions a mile or so away-until recently it was rural for miles around).
There's only so much you can do for remote tower installations, but hopefully someone sees this video and understands it's not a good idea to play around this much RF!
People in 1924: We'll have global communications to share ideas and better society.
People in 2024: We have global communications to cook food on an AM tower for youtube lulz.
8:23 also highlighting by far one of the most messed up parts of the bible
When the sausage touched at the beginning “GOOOOD MOOORNING VIETNAAAM “ would have been a great line to hear coming through!
adding new meaning to 'qrp' 'shall i reduce my pickle'
That was as interesting to watch as Justin's Smarter Every Day when set up a rig to see what happens when two bullets collide.
Well done. I really enjoyed the video.
In Australia we have this thing called a democracy sausage.
It's the sausage sizzle at an election point, usually at the exit poll side
Im @ 4:35... I'm guessing that the pickle was just too conductive, and stole most of the power as a short circuit, instead of burning away as a plasma and producing sound.
Thanks guys! Fascinating!!!
Next time you're thinking about doing this, I'd also suggest considering the possible damage to the structure - burning off any anticorrosion coating (paint?) on it and coating it in corrosion-promoting salty/acidic solutions, maybe even pitting from local arcing?
Fascinating stuff. I think the corn dog did so well due to all of the oil in its coating. The tower leg was definitely becoming more resistive with the carbon building up on it. We did the electric pickle at a concert venue a couple of times and the secret there is a small board with two hefty nails that go into the ends of the pickle (I guess in this configuration you'd have an anode nail (the drain) and the cathode (the source - touched to the tower) - do it at night and you'll definitely get plasma in the pickle that will mimic the audio going through it. Loved this video! 🫡 👍
I bet the radio host had a blast playing along with your experiment.
As the pickle dies "why have you done this to us"
Has your dad done a video on why there’s still AM stations? I would have thought that FM has more advantages.
We've touched on the topic in some of our videos earlier this year. Will probably again!
To more completely answer the question about what happens to the energy when shorting to ground potential: Think about all the heat and smoke you’re generating by burning the hotdogs… mainly it’s going into heating the meat. Some may be re-radiated in RF frequency ranges, yet not efficiently or effectively. More effective is the re-radiating as sound energy through the “plasma speaker” and into the air. Also, don’t forget that dirt is actually a rather poor conductor, and not much current is flowing directly through the dirt.
For more on myth-busting the ground / dirt ideas… see Bill Whitlock’s papers and presentations on the topic. One in particular where he talks about the non-involvement of the earth grounding rods to residential AC fault currents is actually up here on RUclips in a video titled “Bill Whitlock - Signal Interfaces Debunked - 4/27/2021”. At about 38 minutes in is where he starts talking about the relevant physics and concepts involved.
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
This was great, as always. To me as a german, the Bratwurst joke was hilarious 😄
Didin't knew you were onto this kind of thing :D Well you learn everyday :D
So a bit ago I learned that carrier current broadcasting is a way of broadcasting AM without a license, but there isn't a lot of practical knowledge out there on how it's actually done. Might be a good topic for a future video
Having gotten Bit by my 100w HF rig one time I dont think Ill be testing this out at any AM transmitter site anytime soon
So the dog acts as a detector. I guess the power flow is flucting and the heating effect is also changing and generating the sound waves. You can cook hot dogs with 120 VAC directly on the line. In the 60's you could buy electric hot dog cookers. Or you can put nails in each end and hook to the line.
The "don't touch this" hot dog cooker!
@@GeerlingEngineering Ya. The ones they sold had an interlocked cooker. But I wonder about chemicals for the electrodes. The FDA may have shut it down. Once upon a time long long ago I worked on technology that killed microorganisms in food using high electric fields and we had to pass FDA muster.
It was the Presto Hot Dogger. I had one in college; this was before cheap microwave ovens. They worked fine, except the ends tasted metallic. You could cook six hot dogs (in parallel) in 60 seconds.
@@JamieStuff That's it.
That XR-12 still looks like new. They've treated it well. We still build XR-3 and XR-6.
EXCELLENT CONTENT.
Note his distance from the tower...for a reason.
And note the hot dog and pickle are grounded, not his end of the pole.
And avoid even touching a fence around a BC antenna tower. Theres no guarantee each wire is grounded.
The tx wont much notice.
The current shunts cores (?) are showing up " hot"!
Foldback? I assume the power drop was active foldback in the PA and not just RF dissipation?
PS as to arcing, similar happens at the top of the tower with corona discharge which is also RF energy, just not necessarily the same frequency nor from the PA. Cirona vaporizes a corona hat eventually.
Yep, the Transmitter/PA stage was hitting current limiting protections, according to Nautel design engineers performing as designed-and apparently they've done much more extreme tests on their transmitters, shorting the path even closer to the transmitter to ground!
Please explain how the Hi-Z conductor (hot dog, pickle, brat) acts as a demodulator for the signal. I think it has something to do with the resistance of the material, but I'd love to hear from the RF engineer.
It's AM modulated - the arc itself becomes a speaker following the envelope of the AM.
Would the power output be enough to try and do Lichtenberg wood burning style artwork? from the RF
the pickle was very conductive, causing a short, as i think its called the brine juice in pickling vinegar and salt plus pickle stuff, i would say that acts as an electrolyte adding to the conductivity of the pickle. just a thought at 1.49AM.
I have a plasma globe. The kind you can get online or in a novelty store very cheaply. I've noticed if I put a penny on top of the glass dome, I can draw a small arc (maybe half a millimetre) from the penny to my finger which burns the outermost layer of my skin.
What kind of burn is this please? Plasma? Electrical? RF? I'm curious.
It's a small RF burn given the high frequency used here.
So, I recently heard about the 2004 Smokey the Bear Ballon Incident where a hot air balloon, crashed into the KKOB Radio Towers. Now the people who where in the basket of the Ballon were safe and they started to climb down. The engineers immediately turned of the Antennas but in the news segment on KATV stated that the people who were climbing down were safe if the Antenna was on until they step foot on ground. Everyone did survive but I still have questions. Im not 100% sure but if the Antenna was still on when they got on it, why didn't they get hirt. Why if they step foot on the ground would they have possibly died due to being exposed to the energy of the tower?
Depends on the specifics, but that seems to be a 50kW tower. They would at minimum get a very decent RF burn unless they jumped off the tower as far from it as they could!
If you ever find yourself on an energized tower, best bet is to call the engineering staff and have them turn it off before attempting the dismount!
These experiments are nuts and I fcking love that
From the comments, a few people have had RF burns.
Is there any difference between an RF burn and a burn from a high voltage electric shock? Maybe it's just surviving and telling the tale?
There is! For one, RF burns don't seem to affect muscle quite the same, and is more like an internal flame path... I think it's something we may discuss more in a future video.
@@GeerlingEngineering Yes, please!
KHOJ is the old KIRL. My dad and I used it as an ADF, flying in and out of St. Charles.
Did that with a Continental Doherty modulated 10 KW AM. The Continental didn't care what the load was, would not fold back on you like that. The Continental is still there as an aux because when there's lightning or something goes sideways with the DA, I can switch to the aux and stay on the air.
Pickle juice is an electrolyte that carries current better than just having a hot dog. Now if you could only toast smores on it.
"Ahh, ahh! So wha- why have you done this to us?"
- Pickle
9:50 - It's 10x the strength of a typical microwave oven,in terms of RF power. It's a much lower frequency,though. And yes,RF burns suck in a different kind of way..high voltage,high frequency (relatively) energy is "different". It feels different,and behaves differently.
love your channel so much fun and facts...
Good green screen game. I didn't notice any green glow people usually have. :)
Found a neat Final Cut Pro plugin called Keyper, I used that on my Dad (didn't use the greenscreen for him, oops!), but it has little blotches on hair and motion. The lighting in my studio space is soooo nice for an even green screen for keying out-didn't have to do much tweaking to get almost a perfect matte!
"Don't mess with towers" lol
Damn I was playing around one of these as a kid in a place we broke into…. Glad we didn’t climb it, never knew, there wasn’t a single sign warning us either
Many towers aren't AM, or energized (they just have antennas mounted at the top), so those towers wouldn't fry you while touching the base.
Always better to just not touch them at all, but some towers are less dangerous than others (but all should have warning signs, even if they're completely off-they can receive enough energy to give you a nice shock, in certain scenarios, especially if grounding systems are broken).
AM works with a carrier signal (1460) and the upper and lower side bands. A typical AM signal has a bandwidth of 10kHz
Well, actually 100% negative modulation and 125% positive modulation. Crazy as it sounds, that's legal.
This would be a great RF safety video, a lot better than the corny osha ones.😂
It may have something to do with the chemical composition of the pickle changing upon ignition from the RF. It would be interesting also to study RF propagation across different chemical mediums.
Not only don't mess with towers, but stay outside the fence!!!
The “AM” breakfast sausage lol😂
WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO US the pickle screams