Exploding pagers

PETN heated by a laser.

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Laser pulse initiation of RDX-Al and PETN-Al composites explosion

Joe Gwinn

Extremely trivial, I'd have thought. But that wasn't my question.

But that's not what has been claimed. The MSM gave us to understand that the explosive involved could be triggered by a the kind of temperature increase we would expect from an overheating lithium battery. No one has yet specifically named a practical explosive which does this. You say PETN can be triggered by heating from a laser which is not the same thing at all. I like questioning official narratives, but am getting rather tired of this one. I'm not *that* interested to pursue the matter ad infinitum.

And work for "newspapers" like the WaPo and NYT.

Not necessarily. Journalist tend to have a talent for journalism which isn't necessarily nutured by by a university education.

These are real newspapers, and publish real news, as opposed to the fatuous fantasies to which Cursitor Doom is addicted.

Nothing I read in the main stream media suggested anything of the sort. The kind of right-wing nonsense peddlers that Cursiotr Doom is addicted to may well have confused batteries with explosives in them with lithium ion batteries which sometimes have failed catastropically, but that's simple ignorance, of the kind that Cursitor Doom exhibits at frequent intervals.

And nobody sane would post that kind of information in a public forum.

You aren't interested in "pursuing" the matter at all - you just want to post some more fatuous speculations.

I know little of explosives, but were I asked to make something suitable, I'd drill a hole in some high-explosive, fill it with gunpowder, embed a filament in the gunpowder and encase the whole thing in steel.

Would that work?

I do wonder how the walkie-talkies were set off. Would they have to include some GSM circuitry?

Detonators are usually a fine wire or nowadays a metallic thin film resistor that heats up very fast, in microseconds, and starts some primer material, which then detonates the main charge.

I was talking to a guy at a flea market who designs nukes. He said that modern gadgets use an explosive that is very hard to trigger; ordinary detonators won't work. They use a tiny thing, a substrate with a thin-film resistor coated with some special primer stuff. That thing is embedded in the main explosive.

You can see some similar detonators at the visitors center in Los Alamos.

Just a pager message, probably.

Do walkie-talkies generally have that facility?

(chomp)

Not all that special. Pagers made since about 1990 all included a "group call" feature, where all the pagers in a pre-programmed group activate simultaneously. It's normally used to broadcast announcements:

Pagers and cell phones have problems on airplanes. The older airplane have an aluminum outer skin, which acts as a partial shield. Current model airplanes are full of carbon fiber, which acts as an RF absorber and is actually more effective at blocking RF than a patchwork of sheet aluminum.

However, that's not why pagers (and cell phones) have problems on airplanes. Pagers do not tolerate co-channel interference very well:

I've been randomly watching various YouTube videos in a futile attempt to obtain accurate information on the technology used. Literally, every video was useless.

For example, many experts are claiming that pagers are no longer used. It's not what it used to be before the 1990's and introduction of cell phones, but they certainly are quite common if you know where to look. For a time, I was selling pagers modified to close several relay contacts. They were used for everything between wireless rebooting a computer to turning on/off equipment. The local fire department uses both pagers and walkie-talkies. The pagers predominate because they are cheaper. Some of the voice pagers include storage for recording the last dispatch so it could be replayed.

The Icom IC-V82 walkie-talky is a different story. The IC-V82 does not come stock with a paging (POCSAG or Flex) decoder. It could be used to provide a paging function with the addition of either the optional UT-108 DTMF decoder or the UT-118 DSTAR digital voice and decoder. In order to "group call" these radios, the handhelds would need to be part of a DSTAR radio repeater network.

I could write a long rant on explosives and other "amazing facts" from online experts, but I don't want to write anything that might be construed as bomb making instructions. Sorry.

Nope. Gunpowder is insufficiently brisant for this purpose. Nowhere near in fact.

They might concievably have used CTCSS. The more recent versions would most certainly be able to do this.

They still needed some way to fire the detonator, sort of a spare port pin on the uP or whatever is in the pager.

A pager controller chip with relay driver outputs would be ideal as the booby trap.

So what would happen?

Sure, but that's fairly easy. The model number of the pager seems to have been made by: Gold Apollo Co Ltd Model number: AL-A25S

I couldn't find anything on this AL-A25S model, but did find some useful info on the AL-A26, which seems to be similar. Actually, I think I may have one of these pagers:

Further down the data sheet: Alerting: 4 Beep alerts w/ LED flash 10 Melodic alerts w/ LED flash Vibration w/ LED flash LED flash only An external logic circuit and relay driver could trigger on any of these outputs. For example, setting the group call to generate one of the 4 beep alerts, and then decoding the beeps with a relay driver should work.

As I vaguely recall, there is also an uncommitted test point on the PCB that can be used to drive a transistor that runs a bell or buzzer. This is a common configuration for fire departments, where the buzzer or bell is used to wake up the fireman at night.

Nothing.

Not even a little 'phut!" ?

...

There is a kind of walkie talkie that works similarly to GSM. They need repeaters, even a repeater network.

That way a policeman can talk to any other policeman or fireworker or ambulance driver in the city, or the entire region. In privacy if desired. And without fees.

I don't know the name of the system.

Modern gun powder is interisting in the way it 'goes off'. If put in open air it will burn slow. If you put a round in the fire or frying pan on the stove and heat it up it will sort of explode but with little force. The bullet part will hardly move and the brass case would not penetrate a cardboard box that you put over it. Now take the same round , say a handgun round and put it in a gun and stop up the barrel and it will explode and disable the gun and if the gun is held in the hand it will mostlikely damage your hand. The more pressure it is under, the faster it burns. It never explodes but just burns faster and the generated gas is what does the damage.

The old time black powder is different, it burns at the same rate all the time. Put a teaspoon full and put a match to it and it all seems to go off at the same time.It is what is called a low explosive. There are high explosives that only a small amout will cause lots of damage.

TETRA.