Talk:The Calm/@comment-26269248-20150604152316/@comment-26247132-20150604174037

Okay, this might get technical and I'm not sure how realistic any of the show is in regards to jamming signals, but I'll try to explain it as best as I can. Basic fundamentals of communication: you need a transmitter to send a message and a receiver to receive said message. A walkie-talkie is a transceiver: both transmits and receives messages over a radio frequency. Jamming a frequency at its most basic is simply transmitting noises over a channel/frequency so no one else can receive over it, which is what Mount Weather was doing with the signal we hear on the Exodus ship's black box and Monty's radio.

Now, when it comes to signal jamming, the more power the transmitter has, the more ability it has to override any other transmitters' messages and block the receiver from receiving any other signals (the "loudest" one wins). That means, the closer you get to the transmitter, the more powerful it is. In the case of walkie-talkies, the receivers for the walkies are far enough away from the Mount Weather transmitter but close enough to the other walkie-talkies' transmitters that the frequency is able to come through unjammed because the walkie transmitters have more power with each other than MW has at that distance. We even see this at work in BMHB1 when they are unable to use their bomb trigger on the door and have to manually set it off because they were too close to MW so even their close-range transmitter no longer worked (and theoretically, neither would their walkies if they tried to use them). So, in The Calm, as Monty got closer to MW and the radio tower/signal, the more power the MW transmitter had over his walkie and that is why we started hearing the jamming signal before he was abducted. Another possibility is that the Mountain Men might have also brought a portable jammer with them when they abducted him.

As to how Jaha was able to talk to Mecha without the signal being jammed, the simplest explanation is that it might have been on a frequency that MW hadn't started jamming yet because no one else had been using that channel until Mecha came down. When MW saw the signal going out on that frequency, then they probably started jamming it (and all other frequencies) which is why Jaha was unable to get in contact with anyone else on the ground after that.

For the Bellamy radio, what actually happened was that Monty hacked into MW's radio tower and freed up a frequency that had been jammed prior (this is why he needed to get into the MW Command Center). No jamming involved. In fact, if any of the other Stations had figured out one of the frequencies was no longer being jammed, they would have been able to transmit to Camp Jaha.

Caveat: my background is mostly network and phone transmissions so I might have gotten something wrong/confused