Author:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
It all began at the beginning of last week when we noticed that the brand new surround sound system we have, which we use instead of the TV speakers was turning itself up on its own.
This was not the only thing either as later, it began switching itself out of mute and then turning the volume up to maximum. The first time this happened I'd muted the sounds before racing up to spend a penny, nearly caused me to miss the porcelain altogether as it came on at maximum volume (550 watts) with a vengeance and sent the cat under the bed, leaving nothing but a vapour trail and scorched carpet behind him.
It was driving us mad and after sending an email to LG to explain what was happening and ask for help, I figured it would all be fixed soon.
That wasn't to be, but it seemed to cure itself, which was just as well as LG never replied.
However, that wasn't the end of it.
At the same time as the above cured itself, we started getting the most annoying beeeeeep... booooooop... noise that was happening about every three minutes... all day and all night.
I initially thought that it was the LG home cinema box; a kind of natural progression from controlling itself, it had obviously got bored with just tweaking the volume as all we did was turn it down again, so it had decided on more directly annoying methods.
I unplugged it and left it, but the noise kept on going. It wasn't that then.
I unplugged the TV. No change; not that either.
I unplugged the video. No change. Nope, it wasn't that.
Finally, I unplugged the Sky box. The sound stopped.
"Aha!" I thought and phoned Sky.
In due course, an engineer came round and listened as the noise came regularly, every three minutes. He scratched his head a lot after swapping out the old box for a brand new one out of the cellophane, which didn't cure the problem.
"Dunno mate," he said and arranged to have one of the more technical bods come round and have a butchers.
Now the curious thing is that when we unplugged the Sky box, the noise stopped and he even said so. So upon coupling up the new box and finding that the noise restarted immediately, he was completely lost.
Well, I haven't heard a dickie bird from Sky since they replaced our box, but last night and quite by accident, Pen discovered something weird.
Our cat flap is battery operated and is a security device to keep out all unwanted cats. Sam has a special electronic gizmo on his collar that tells the cat flap to unlock when he's near to it and it appears it was running low on power.
I changed the batteries.
No more noise.
Okay; I know; I'm thick, but it did seem to have me, the Sky engineer and everyone else baffled.
The coincidences were stacking up though and it's easy to see how I could have been fooled as it seemed to occur and not occur right at key moments and it was impossible to get a bearing on where the noise was coming from when it was about.
Thanks to Pen, we got a brand new Sky box and I doubt very much whether they'll come back and reclaim it.
Lesson learnt...
Until the next time that is :)
Comments
Thanks for the info
Hello Nick,
I am glad that you found the source for the interference. Ii might be that the cat-door-opener did radiate some VeryLowPower sicnal that would cause the thing on your cat to start announcing a wish to get back in. Being a Radioamateur, I will print out a copy of your message and add that to our HUGE collection of Interefeence. We can many times get accused for causing interference and have as great problems to ID the source. This was a new one for me.
If I were closer to you I would have liiked to test your place for 430 - 470 MHz. There are many frequencies set aside for door-openers on cars, LowPower walkie-talkies, medical surveillance and so on.
Many greetings for you, your family and the little four-legged friend from
Ginnie
GinnieG
remote cat
Try the sky remote on the cat and cat door because they are probably on the same frequency.
Hugs,
Jenna From FL
Moderator/Editor
TopShelf BigCloset
Hugs,
Jenna From FL
Moderator/Editor
TopShelf BigCloset
It is a long road ahead but I will finally become who I should be.
IR?
Do the instructions for your remote say to keep it pointed at the sound system when operating it? If so, your remote is an infrared or IR remote, most remotes are. Your cat's radio frequency collar would have no effect on your systems volume in that case.
Mr. Ram
ROFL
So, it's true? Cats control the world!
It's been a strange week...
Nick, this sounds like something that Angharad's Bonzi would dream up.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
I hope this
isn't just an excuse as to why you haven't done the next episode of your cliffside heroine is it?
I can assure you, Bonzi isn't involved, he's still trying to develop a way to enrich uranium using cat litter and flea spray. Besides, he doesn't use cat flaps, he has his own door key.
Angharad
Angharad
Life’s good...
...not necessarily with LG, but when you get to the bottom of strange problems.
The only thing I can think of that's more frustrating than the scenario you've described is when you get the engineers or techies there (at great cost), only to be unable to reproduce the problem.
As the saying goes (thanks Bill), ‘all’s well that ends well.’ So, life’s good with LG when you resolve the issues.
Puzzling Situations
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
Interference can be confusing!
When I converted our house to use Vonage (internet phone service), I bought a wireless phone with 4 stations, since I wasn't sure the modem could power up four phones. Things worked well for a couple weeks but we noticed that at seemingly random times the wireless phones were very noisy or had dropouts. We eventually realized that it was interference from the microwave oven. Well, we don't need to be on the phone when dinner's cooking anyway.
We also had some problems with slow internet service, but it seemed to come and go too. We eventually tracked that to the microwave too.
Finally, the latest thing, I bought a wi-fi enabled printer, and recently discovered that is affected by the microwave! There's no indication that the microwave has ever been damaged in any way, it's well grounded and the case design traps most of the RF (that's how they work, after all). If there's a moral to this, I guess it would be, choose frequencies not in the 900MHZ range.
It's entirely possible your skybox has both RF and IR interfaces, and it's also possible that close-proximity RF can sneak into the circuitry from something as simple as a cable with a broken shield.
It's amazing how much RF is getting radiated from earth these days. I sometimes wonder what intelligent life on other worlds will make of old episodes of Gilligans Island when they get there. Interesting problem, at least it wasn't a ghost!
Hugs
Carla Ann
Cold calls?
Hi Carla Ann
Any chance I can borrow your microwave? (lol)
I don't know about where you live, but if you were a betting person, around here you would do well to wager money on receiving unwanted cold calls right on dinner time. You know, the sort that are requesting donations to charity, trying to sell you air conditioning or credit cards or newspaper subscriptions, or are conducting surveys.
Periodic Salespeople
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
Thanks for the tips, but
There's just one small thing many of you seemed to have overlooked...
The whole thing was a bunch of coincidences and actually nothing to do with the satellite box - although, the teckie did think that it was interference from somewhere. He also said that that noise was the digibox initialising itself. Just shows how much he knew and he's worked for Sky for eight years :)
The whole thing was down to the beeping cat flap and that's beeping as in making a noise, I'm not trying to bleep expletives!
Still, all's well that ends well (as quoted above). The teckie phoned earlier to set a time to come and see the problem again with an even more teckie person, but I had to tell him the problem righted itself. There was no way I was going to tell him the truth after all. I even offered to let him come back and give us our old digibox back, but he told me it's alright, we can keep the new one.
Every silver lining has a cloud wrapped round it :)
I don't just look it, I'm totally getting on with Cliffside...
Flo Control cat flap
"Our cat flap is battery operated and is a security device to keep out all unwanted cats. Sam has a special electronic gizmo on his collar that tells the cat flap to unlock when he's near to it..."
I thought you and the other cat servants might appreciate this:
http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm
Kris
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
Flo Control
As if I haven't already got enough to do.
Besides, the house isn't ours and the cat flap is on the front door. I could install some of what Flo Control describes, but I feel it would probably impede human entry/exit too much to be safe.
My biggest fear would be when returning with the weekly shopping and whilst carrying several heavy bags...
I think you can see my point. After all, I'm not the most stable of people at the best of times.
I don't just look it, I'm totally unstable