The Taylorator: Flooding the Broadcast FM Band with Taylor Swift Songs using a LimeSDR
Over on Hackaday and creator Stephen's blog, we've seen an article about the 'Taylorator,' open source software for the LimeSDR that floods the broadcast FM band with Taylor Swift music. In his blog post, Stephen explains how he wrote this software, explaining the concepts behind audio preparation, FM modulation, and what computing hardware was required to implement it.
The advertised use case of the Taylorator is obviously a bit of a joke; however, as the video on Stephen's blog shows, his software can play a different song on every broadcast FM channel. So, there could be some use cases where you might want people to be able to tune an FM radio to custom music on each channel. Of course, you could also just use it to play a practical joke on someone.
In terms of legality, in his blog post, Stephen notes that blasting the broadcast FM band on every channel is probably not legal and may go against the spirit of low-power FM transmitter laws in most countries. However, he notes that spreading a few mW over 20 MHz of bandwidth results in a weak signal that is unlikely to travel very far. Regardless, we would advise potential users of the software to check their local laws before going ahead and playing around with something like this.
The software is open source and available on Stephen's GitLab.
Even less than a milli Watt of radiated power can interfere and endanger human lives, since the aeronautical Instrument Landing Systems operates between 108.1 to 111.95 MHz and are very sensitive to any interference e.g. weak Cable Television leakage or noise like signals!
You have to remember that airborne aircraft are directly in Line Of Sight to interference on the ground and therefore a signal is nearly not attenuated unlike on the ground.
Since even commercial BC transmissions cannot limited their radiated energy to the designated channel, they do generate interference into ILS/VOR receiver if the BC channels are not coordinated to not to interfere into an operational ILS/VOR channel.
Software Defined Transmitter generate not a narrow signal but a broad signal and a noise floor well above 108.00 MHz which is why such a signal is not a negligible interference source if it is radiating within the area defined for ILS-Approach.