The Transporter Saga [or, how I learned to love the Wi-Fi Bomb]

Well, I may have an update, of a sort. 

I haven't yet identified if the green 'pots' on the board are actual adjustable signal potentiometers, or the crystal units, so I can't touch those until i'm sure what they are.

I got a lot more results while researching other stuff though   

Here in the UK, I found that Ofcom [for those of you in the US, Ofcom is the British version of the FCC, responsible for Radio, TV and other broadcasted signal regulation as well as regulating our Postal system Royal Mail] has a table of all the used radio frequencies here in the UK. 

I have had to do some guesswork here, but my best guess is that this uses a VHF signal. 

My reason for coming to this conclusion [at present] is that a lot of cheaper RC toy cars [read, the type sold in toy stores for children, rather than hobbyists] use either a 27mHz or 49mHz fixed frequency VHF transmitter, as these are bands not normally used for anything in particular, and indeed, the Ofcom charts show that these two bands are exempt from licensing requirements in 'low power' scenarios, effectively this boils down to model hobbyists and other lower powered applications. 

45mHz is the number to focus on here, which I have determined was actually a relatively common R/C toy band, on toys that generally originated in Japan - Notably, the Tomy 'Bit Char-G' and Takara RC Beyblades also use 45mHz, although the Beyblades do have a frequency selector due to the nessecity of having two RC controllers in close proximity - Yep, I know as I have one, because playing Beyblade competitively is my other big hobby outside Plarail and other model railways LOL .

Having done some more research with the Japanese government ministry that is their equivalent to Ofcom, unlike many countries, 45mHz sits directly in the middle of a band of public radio allocation for radio and mobile communications, meaning out there, 45mHz isn't some kind of forbidden band, and probably going a long way to explaining why it seems to be a specifically popular band for Japanese RC toys.

However, here in the UK, the band that includes 45mHz VHF, which I am having to assume this unit runs on for now, since the Japanese version was on that band, is, and this is quoted straight from Ofcom;

• UK2.1 - Responsibility for granting permissions to use frequencies in this Allocation rests with Defence. All frequency permissions are reserved exclusively for Defence use except where assignments for Civil use are agreed with Ofcom.
  

So, to convert that to plain English, this set of bands is controlled by, and the responsibility of the UK Ministry of Defence [MoD] for the specific use of the British military forces, the Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. 



Now, here's where things get a little sketchy. TOMY haven't specified the power rating of this unit, meaning I have literally no idea whether this is just a low-power unit that's basically not even of any concern, or is potentially putting out significant levels of radio interference onto military VHF bands. It's definitely a much higher-power unit than most typical toystore RC cars, as it's using a 9V battery in the controller, and 2 C's in the truck itself, and the manual claims an apparent 3-meter transmission range, quite a bit further than any other basic RC cars i've had.

I'm concerned it may be the latter, as it's clearly picking up significant levels of background interference [for what it's worth, I shut off all WiFi in the house and the TV signal booster to rule those out], and therefore there's a very real possibility that every time I push the control button, I'm basically inadvertently launching interference into possibly critical radio bands operated by the MoD.


MAJOR UPDATE


OK, so I got it working. Yeah, really.

After all the digging I did, I decided to try one rather random solution from an RC forum, and that is to shield the recieving apparatus with tinfoil [a very rudimentary Faraday Cage] in order to block unessecary EMF interference.

While that didn't work especially well, I found that if I repositioned the aerial slightly, all of a sudden it began to function normally, with no interference! It cycled as expected through all the directional positions, without trying to drive forwards or backwards on it's own [the sign of interference], only moving when the button was pressed on the remote. 

Without any equipment to do a frequency check I think this may well rule out that this uses an unauthorised frequency then, and that all the unusual glitches may have been caused by little more than a poor aerial connection, which I intend to clean and re-seat now to hopefully restore expected function.

This more or less conclusively proves what I hoped was the best-case scenario, that TOMY UK re-programmed this 'export version' with a 'safe' frequency for export rather than using the Japanese 45mHz, and the errors were probably caused by little more than a bad wire joint, which is certainly a relief.

While I have this open, I plan to get some photos of the inside of the gearbox [if I can] so maybe I can work out how that works, and hopefully explain it here.