What was that contraption Mike put together ?
I know older cars and was also a Radio Shack freak. I'm just hearing now that it was a 'tracking device'. Huh.
shareThe tracking device he got from the other guy.
share
MovieChat Forums > Better Call Saul (2015) Discussion > What was that contraption Mike put toget...
MacGuyver ain't got shit on Mike.
share
Nobody got shit on Mike! He's a badass!
π
Walter got deadly shit-shot on him tho'.
share
Unfortunately I never watched BB, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.
π
He and Walt are both very smart. In Breaking Bad, they were adversaries- Mike was a hit man on orders to kill him, Walt would always put himself in a position where the hit would be delayed or impossible to carry out. They were pretty much equals, but Walt was able to extend the game long enough to catch Mike in a vulnerable position.
shareFor anyone who didn't put two and two together, the cover of the manual Mike is reading after he gets his own copy from the vet is a dead giveaway. Even people who don't recognize the company name can just google it.
When Mike hooked it up to the radio, it was so he would be alerted by the disruption of the radio when the planted tracker "woke up" upon receiving a handshake from the base station of whoever is tracking him. He pulled the battery so they'd lose the signal and think it was dead and/or in need of a fresh battery. This lures them to take Mike's gas cap, which unbeknownst to them contains Mike's live tracker.
Nice break down.
share
Thanks, ernie. You're obviously a tech guru.
π
With respect, I don't think this is exactly correct. I think Mike hooked the tracker up to the radio, simply so that it would drain the battery. He did this because he noticed when he bought his own, that the handheld device alerts the user when the battery of the tracker is low. So he hooked it up to the radio and left it on, to speed up the process. Hours later when the radio started fading out, I think that just meant he knew the battery was low so they would be alerted, and then pulled it knowing they would send someone out.
shareYou may be right. My logic was based partly on the idea that in an RF transmitter application, if a device driven by an "AA" battery is going to have any kind of useful life on a single battery, it will either have to limit transmission power a lot (and therefore range) or only run intermittently. I took Mike's test with his own receiver (where the "low battery" indicator was seen) as merely a test to see what the receiver does when the signal drops from battery disconnect (which we also saw in that scene), but your explanation probably fits better.
shareEither way, that's a fascinating tidbit about RF transmitters, you have educated me! I had been wondering how a device like that could get any kind of life out of one measly AA battery.
shareThat is what I thought. Simply pulling the battery out (without the other end getting a battery low signal) would set off red flags and make the people monitoring think that he found the tracker and just pulled the battery out in panic.
shareYeah, though if they're in the habit of using these trackers with any regularity, getting less than the expected service life out of a fresh battery should set off red flags regardless of whether it cuts out suddenly or not. And maybe those flags *have* been set off. Maybe they're leading Mike somewhere on purpose...
share