Member Avatar for SAZAR

Hello. As you can guess by the look of the title, I too own the THANE's "world's smallest digital camera".

Also I own a cheap Chinese-made talkie-walkie.

Funny thing happens when I connect my minicam (above mentioned) to the USB port of my computer, and I turn on my cheap Chinese talkie-walkie at the same time. (maybe you can notice the sarkasm in my words)

You see - the cheap Chinese-made talkie-walkie of mine starts whistleing a very strange tune quite loud indeed. It seems that the USB cable (or the camera itself) transmits the signal from my THANE mini camera right in the old ether!

I move with my cheap Chinese-made talkie-walkie all around my room, and it's still very strong, so - how far it goes then?!

Is our privacy at stake?
Answer...

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Dani AI

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Short expert addendum tying the posts together and next steps.

As observed (and as guessed), the camera or its USB lead is almost certainly acting as an unintentional radiator: switching/clocking and USB power noise can couple onto the cable and the assembly behaves like a little transmitter. Cheap radios will happily demodulate whatever falls into their receive band, producing the whistle. This is an EMC/Part‑15 type issue rather than a deliberate transmitter. (law.cornell.edu)

Practical checks and fixes to try (cheap and non‑destructive): power the camera from its battery instead of USB to see if the signal goes away; swap to a different USB cable and port; move the walkie farther from the rig; clamp one or two snap‑on ferrite cores onto the USB cable and the camera end; temporarily wrap the cable/connector in grounded foil or place the camera in a metal box to check for reduction. For structured troubleshooting, use a portable AM/FM receiver or an inexpensive RTL‑SDR to localize frequency and strength before replacing hardware. Ferrite beads and basic shielding often solve this class of problem. (en.wikipedia.org)

About the lost pictures: stop using or writing to the card. Remove it and create a forensic image, then attempt recovery from the image (not the original) with recovery tools. Example imaging command (Linux) using ddrescue, then run PhotoRec/QPhotoRec on the image or the card:

ddrescue -n /dev/sdX card-image.img mapfile

PhotoRec is well suited for carved photo recovery; Recuva is a common Windows alternative. Using an image protects the original while trying multiple recovery passes. (gnu.org)

Privacy note and next administrative step: while TEMPEST/van‑Eck research shows electromagnetic eavesdropping is theoretically possible, reconstructing camera image data from casual emissions requires specialist gear/skills and is very unlikely in this scenario. If the device persistently causes harmful interference, escalate to the vendor or file a complaint under Part 15. (en.wikipedia.org)

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Member Avatar for SAZAR

Is anybody there?

Member Avatar for jwenting

no, there's nobody there.

All equipment that has an electrical current flowing through it will transmit radio frequency emissions. Apparently your crappy cheap digicrap and/or your cable are extremely poorly shielded and happen to transmit at the exact frequency at which your crappy cheap radio receives.
Freak coincidence.

And yes, they're out to get you.
Black helicopters will descend on your home and men in white space suits will take you to have experiments performed on you by aliens.

Member Avatar for SAZAR

no, there's nobody there.

All equipment that has an electrical current flowing through it will transmit radio frequency emissions. Apparently your crappy cheap digicrap and/or your cable are extremely poorly shielded and happen to transmit at the exact frequency at which your crappy cheap radio receives.
Freak coincidence.

I am aware of that, and, actually, when I was checking some time ago wheither someone answered on this topic of mine or not I had an idea that somebody might comment just the way you did!! (the I-am-smart-and-you-don't-know-sh** way) Of course that's the way it goes (about electricity, current, conductors, radio emission...), BUT(!!!) - I was surprised by the strenght of a signal, so I wondered if there's someone out there who checked it up (or to check it now) - you know measurment (because I don't have an apropriate aparature to do it) - wheither that signal is just some impulses or the actual data of an image, then - can it be received and interpreted from distance, how far it goes (20m, 50m, 100m?!), etc. It might be an interesting stuff. Obviously cable acts as an transmitter...

And yes, they're out to get you.
Black helicopters will descend on your home and men in white space suits will take you to have experiments performed on you by aliens.

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...Roll?..

Member Avatar for SAZAR

...Oh! And also: what program/utility to use to extract raw data from it's memory.

(I had some really neat pictures on it (damn!), but hot weather and humidity in my pocket made it malfunction and report that there are no pictures in it before I had a chance to transfer it to my computer... help. anyone?...)

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