The Max Headroom Incident

First, welcome back Doitsujin It's been a while.

The person who pulled off this (rather impressive) prank most likely had knowledge of how to operate a television transmitter and access to the equipment.

Because of the poor audio, he was either intentionally distorting it (by letting the video signal bleed in) or he didn't have all of the proper equipment to transmit clean audio or filter the video signal. (I'll have to ask Nitro to chime in one this aspect)

The other thing is that in order not to be caught, he must have been very close to the receiving antennas (which I assume were on top of the Hancock building, man I want to go to Chicago some time) because proximity must have been a factor unless he had more electricity than the average household or apartment would.

Welcome back, Doitsujin!

When I was a kid, my grandpa used to have a really big antenna on the top of his house that could pick up Chicago TV stations. Surely, if he was watching at the time, he would have seen this happen. What a great story it would have made around the holidays to talk about how he saw Max Headroom's butt while watching Dr. Who, which he did all the time.

EDIT: Whoops, it was Cleveland WKYC that we could pick up at his house, not Chicago Maybe he could pick up Chicago, but I don't know.

On Tuesday, January 19th, 2016 at 4:55 am, Miroku said:

He saw Max Headroom's butt on TV all the time while watching Dr. Who?

As for DX'ing TV signals (receiving long distance), Chicago is probably too far away. VHF and UHF typically require line of sight to the transmitter tower for reception, with the noteable exception of tropospheric ducting. While shortwave signals usually bounce off the ionosphere, the frequencies used for TV signals (analog or digital) don't do that.

As for Wolfwood's inquiry, I would say that the prankster absolutely had to be in one of the buildings nearby in order to reach the receiving antennas of the television station in order to hijack the signal. He wasn't overriding or overpowering the transmitter (that would have been impossible to do without being caught right away because the amount of power required would knock out every nearby frequency for blocks unless your transmitter was on a tower) but hijacking the relay feed. This is unlike the Captain Midnight hijacking, where, in that case, the pirate transmitter absolutely had to overpower HBO's uplink transmitter.

On Monday, January 18th, 2016 at 2:20 am, Helena said:

I see what you did there

Back then, seeing someone's backside on live TV was a big deal. Nowadays, someone can be practically naked and no one bats an eye.

Whoever that guy is must have a hard time keeping his mouth shut about it since he still hasn't ever been caught!

(Welcome back, too, Miroku and Wolfwood! Its been a while! )

On Wednesday, January 20th, 2016 at 12:45 pm, KarmaJolt said:

This is exactly my line of thought as well. As a matter of fact, its amazing that whoever did this kept quiet about it all the time. I mean, in November of next year, it will be 30 years...