little black box

     Oh no!  there are spies trying to listen in on the phone calls at my hotel!

     I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so when I saw this thing in my hotel room connected to the phone I figured there was a legitimate reason, but I know some people would probably freak out!

     So what does the secret black box in a New Jersey hotel room have to do with Ham Radio?  Well - Like any other good ham, when I saw what I supposed was an electronic device connected to a communication device, I took it apart!  What do you think it was?

     Ta-da!  RF Choke!

     Now that we know what it is, we don't have to panic - the foreign spies apparently aren't interested in land line conversations from a hotel in NJ after all - we can breathe a sigh of relief.  With that being said, I guess most normal people wouldn't have done this, they probably would have just looked at the sticker on the front of the device and Googled it - but that's no fun!

     Based on the frequencies it says it is for, I would have to assume that there are some strong AM broadcast signals in the area that were causing problems in the audio for the phone handsets, because these were on both the phones in my hotel room, and the phones in the lobby, etc. that I could see.  I didn't notice anything on the ham bands as I was driving into the area, but then again, the only ham band that falls in the range of this device is 160 meters, which I don't have capabilities for in my car.  Maybe a ham from Secaucus will stumble onto this blog entry and let us know if there are some strong AM signals in the area that could be behind all this business.
     What would you do if you saw a funny black box connected to the phone in your hotel room?  Leave a comment and let me know!