You may or may not remember a video of a hilarious prank pulled a number of years ago involving a bunch of guys hijacking drive-thru window frequencies. Basically, they were able to say whatever they pleased to ordering customers. It is an awesome prank, but just how they managed to pull it off was always somewhat of a mystery…until now. The creators have developed a video that illustrates everything that you need to pull this prank off—including some CB radios and a sacrificial toaster. It may cost you a few bucks, but the small investment pales in comparison to the fun you can have. Check out the video after the break.
[Thanks Brad!]
c1ockwork
Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 10:58 AMUmm, there’s nothing new or overly hard about this. A friend and I did this 13 years ago at a McDonalds in Sydney using a Modified Alinco 2M Amateur Radio and a Magnetic Base Antenna. McDonalds setup is pretty simple (assuming it hasn’t changed) – the customers talk to the workers on one frequency. The workers can either talk amongst themselves or back to the customer on another frequency (the differentiation is done using CTCSS tones). The Alinco Radio had 50W of power and no trouble wiping out the (original, legitimate) transmissions on either frequency. Good times were had by all. :-)
gotofukinhell
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 12:23 PMthis asshat wants you to break your radio and your toaster
normally i would to but today im being nice dont try this
Paul
Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 11:45 PMI believe for this to work with a modified CB, it would need to transmit in FM to work properly.
27Mhz radios generally are AM and SSB in most cases. This however may might work with some distortion when using AM.
I would expect the CB radio probably will not perform very well on VHF, if at all without modification to the TX stages. This is because most CB radios will have some sort of harmonic filter network in the RF output stage to attenuate harmonics and frequencies that are out side of the 27MHz band. It’s purpose is aimed to reduce chances of causing interference to other services, eg: FM broadcast,TV and air bands.
Similarly, the RX side will have band pass filtering to reduce inter-modulation (splatter) problems caused by transmitting equipment outside of the listening band, hence RX performance would be poor on anything above 30MHz without modification.
A modified amateur VHF radio (extended TX/RX mod) is your best bet, otherwise a cheap 5 Watt FM VHF wide banded hand held transceiver off ebay are cheaply available and cover frequencies around 154 Mhz. These are guaranteed to work very well here and is what I would probably use.
Once you have a radio designed to cover the frequencies the drive through systems operate on, you’re set. I will not say how I know this, but there will be fun at hand. :)
Similarly, analog cordless phones operate just above 30MHz.
You might have a better chance at modifying a CB radio to work there. Again FM is required for it to work properly, and believe me people will freak out when you say a friendly Hello to them.
For old cordless phones, try getting an old ranger CB that covers 24MHz – 32MHz and also does FM. These transmit up to 25 watts. :)
Do at your own risk, and don’t have antennas all over your car roof unless you want to be caught and seen doing something very illegal!
Regards.
Paul.