It could just be the hard drive heating up."
Can someone explain the gadget they are using to monitor the "hard"(floppy) drive and what exactly the "heating up" is indicative of? Am I to assume that the floppy drive itself was sending a homing signal? Is that even possible? What does heat have to do with it and what did those numbers("26 and 27, so far so good.", etc) mean?
Thanks in advance.
Anyone?
shareThese links may be of relevance/interest:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_receiver
- http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/t_and_m/spectrum_analyser/rf-analyzer-basics-tutorial.php
The numbers ("26, 27") may be indicating radio signal frequency, but more likely signal strength (gain, amplitude, energy; typically measured in dB); the fact that the bad guy reports the numbers in pairs may indicate that it's not so much the level that's important, but rather the fact that the numbers are steadily increasing. So I guess the radio signal needs time to build up (likely, the transmitter in the disk doesn't have its own power source, it's feeding off from the drive's kinetic energy), and as long as the signal strength is still within the amplitudes of noise, it doesn't have to indicate an outgoing signal.
An alternative explanation may be that the numbers indicate signal frequencies/bandwidths, that the measuring device skims through them in increasing order and gives an alert (blinking light, icon on screen) at frequencies/bandwidth channels where there's a significant energy measurement, and that energy measurement at lower frequencies/bandwidths can be ascribed to environmental noise sources and don't have to indicate an outgoing radio signal yet.
But this all is just me combining a bit of theoretical signal processing knowledge with lots of speculation and educated guesses. (I haven't seen the scene in ages, and I have no hands-on experience with this stuff.)
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Joe Satriani - "Always With Me, Always With You"
https://y2u.be/VI57QHL6ge0
Thanks!
I'm not sure if this will be of any help, but here is an image of the device.
http://1drv.ms/1f5FaLo
Thanks for the image. Guess what: the device actually exists! LOL.
It seems to be a Uniden Bearcat BC220XLT Twin Turbo Radio Scanner.
- http://radiopics.com/Bearcat/Uniden%20Bearcat_BC220XLT.htm
- http://www.universal-radio.com/CAtalog/scanners/bc220xlt.html
I don't know how it works, but it seems like it will scan through radio frequencies in increasing order.
It seems that in the movie they have altered the display readout (bigger numbers, so that it's better visible to the audience), and maybe the movie is presenting a (fictional) functionality that the actual device doesn't have.
______
Joe Satriani - "Always With Me, Always With You"
https://y2u.be/VI57QHL6ge0
Thanks again. I will assume it is as you say, "the movie is presenting a (fictional) functionality that the actual device doesn't have.", until anyone with more knowledge replies.
I wish IMDB boards had a higher percentage of people like you.
No problem! Glad to have helped.
______
Joe Satriani - "Always With Me, Always With You"
https://y2u.be/VI57QHL6ge0
I realize this is 9 years old, but in case someone stumbles on this from Google like I did:
The numbers in this scene are totally made up nonsense. The Uniden Bearcat device is just a radio scanner. You program up to 200 frequencies into it and it will quickly scan each of those frequencies checking for transmissions. The stuff Max says here about "it could just be the hard drive heating up" is complete and utter nonsense.
The scene is just trying to show to an uninformed viewer that they're detecting a signal from this floppy device, without going out of their way to deep dive into the tech behind how that would even be possible. It's very much a "this guy has this box with an antenna on it and the numbers are getting bigger and they're acting more tense, it must mean it's picking up a signal or something" scene, it's not trying hard to be technically accurate.
Not to mention there's virtually no way this floppy is literally transmitting a signal in the first place, let alone one that is strong enough to be picked up from anywhere by the IMF. Plus where would it even be getting its power from? The floppy reader is just reading the disk magnetically, it's not injecting power into the thing when it's plugged in.
The best argument would have been it's supposed to be reporting signal strength, but the Uniden device there doesn't do that. As mentioned before, it's just scanning programmed channels looking for transmissions and when it finds a channel with activity it stops and plays the audio out the speaker. And the signal strength wouldn't be slowly increasing like that. It would be spiking up whenever a transmission is bursting and falling back down to nothing. So yeah, the whole scene is just nonsense.