Is it possible to track a person based on the fact that they are listening to a radio receiver? — BRAR, India
While tracking a radio transmitter is easy—you only need to follow the radio waves back to their source—you might think that tracking a radio receiver is impossible. After all, a radio receiver appears to be a passive device that collects radio waves rather than emitting them. But that’s not entirely true. Sophisticated radio receivers often use heterodyne techniques in which the signal from a local radio-frequency oscillator is mixed with the signal coming from the antenna. The mixing process subtracts one frequency from the other so that antenna signals from a particular radio station are shifted downward in frequency into the range the radio uses to create sound. This mixing process allows the radio receiver to be very selective about which station it receives. The receiver can easily distinguish the station that’s nearest in frequency to its local oscillator from all the other stations, just as its easy to tell which note on a piano is closest in pitch to a particular tuning fork.
But heterodyne techniques have a side effect: they cause the radio receiver to emit radio waves. These waves originate with the local radio-frequency oscillator, and with other internal mixing frequencies such as the intermediate frequency oscillator present in many sophisticated receivers. Because these oscillators don’t use very much power, the waves they emit aren’t very strong. Nonetheless, they can be detected, particularly at short range. For example, it’s possible for police to detect a radar detector that contains its own local microwave oscillator. Similarly, people who have tried to pirate microwave transmissions have been caught because of the microwaves emitted from their receivers. In WWII, the Japanese were apparently very successful at locating US forces by detecting the 455 kHz intermediate frequency oscillators in their radios—a problem that quickly led to a redesign of the radios to prevent that 455 kHz signal from leaking onto the antennas (thanks to Tom Skinner for pointing this out to me). As you can see, it is possible to track someone who is listening to the right type of radio receiver. However, the radio waves from that receiver are going to be very weak and you won’t be able to follow them from a great distance.