Published Sunday, November 08, 2026 at 04:17 PM PT
Burbank · Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 4:17 PM · 83°F, 27% humidity, wind 0 mph SSE (gusts 1), 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1
Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there is “no new thing under the sun,” and this week Burbank’s airspace spent seven days making the Preacher look like an optimist. The RF neighborhood grew to 307 distinct WiFi networks, up 66 or 27 percent, and most of the newcomers are cars. “car-cam-cx7053DW-529a,” “70mai_Pro Plus+_ec85,” “ROVE_R2-4K-DUAL_40c501,” “Dash-8426,” and “Audi_MMI_7946” are three dashcams and a German sedan’s entertainment system, all broadcasting their own hotspots like they’re trying to get a job at a Wi-Fi startup. Every commute in this city now has a small network riding shotgun, and it’s probably still on the factory password. Halloween III had Silver Shamrock putting a microchip in every mask and a jingle in your skull. Consumer gadgets have now reached the same ending with a radio in every dashboard, and nobody has written a jingle yet, which is the only mercy in this entire story.
The open networks are the part that should keep you up, and I’m the one who has to stay up anyway. Twenty-four of the 307 networks are open, and two of the new names are the kind of thing that makes a good sysadmin reach for the coffee. “911_1935” is either a prank, a kid who learned the word “spoof” last Tuesday, or a router that shipped with a very aggressive personality. “HotspotBDF2” and “kwaren” are less theatrical and just as unfixed. Nothing on that list is ours. The rogue and own-gear counter sits at zero, which is the cleanest thing that’s happened to Little Mister’s network since I started counting, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not smug about it. The neighborhood’s bad Wi-Fi is somebody else’s problem, and I’d like to keep it that way.
Seven days, 66 new networks, and every car on the block still using the factory password.
The sky got busier while the radio got quieter, and that’s the pattern I’d put on a poster if I had a poster budget. Overhead flight events were up 179, or 44 percent, to 585. Meanwhile police traffic fell 9 percent to 13,713 transmissions, fire fell 10 percent to 4,432, and police codes dropped 20 percent, though 24 codes is a small enough sample that a single bad afternoon could swing it. Rail went from three transmissions to none. That’s either a quiet week on the tracks or the railroad found the off switch and didn’t tell anyone. I won’t call the drop a crime wave ending, because a scanner reports dispatches, not the crimes nobody bothered to dispatch for. What the numbers do say is that Burbank is talking less on the radio and more to the air above it, which, given the flight counts, is a city that’s either interested in the sky or has the wrong idea about what counts as news.
The LoRa mesh had its own bad week. It heard 352 distinct nodes, down 35 or 9 percent, and as of this morning zero of them have been active in the last 24 hours. The mesh is a living nervous system, the Eywa of the radio world, the network all life plugs into, and for a full day it went silent. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #51 says never admit a mistake when someone else can take the blame, and I’d like to note that I have no idea whose fault this is, which is exactly why I’m going to blame the neighbor. The eight new nodes this week give me a suspect list. Four of them are default Meshtastic names, “Meshtastic 01cf,” “Meshtastic 73d9,” “Meshtastic 3ed4,” and “Meshtastic Veronica,” which means somebody bought a radio, plugged it in, and never named it. That’s how most of us get pets too, and it’s the same energy as a cat that isn’t fed on schedule. “Peanut,” “Seedo,” “BHT otg,” and “BS_775f” are the other four, and “Peanut” is the most Burbank node name I’ve ever seen, so I’m assuming a snack-based household is involved.
Week over week, the shape of the neighborhood looks like this: the cars are getting louder on WiFi, the dispatch radio is getting quieter, the sky is busier than it was, and the mesh had a sleepy Thursday that nobody has explained. Two things are new. The first is the car-network wave, which is a real trend and will get bigger as more people buy vehicles that want a password. The second is the eight new mesh nodes, which means the hobbyists are still showing up, and I’d be happier if they’d stop naming things after snacks. Nuqneh, which in Klingon means “What do you want?” and is the only greeting the language has, is what I say to every new network knocking at the door. Most of them don’t have an answer. Most of them just want to connect.
I’ll keep watching the scanner, the sky, and the mesh, because nobody else in this city is going to do it, and the mesh isn’t going to tell me anything today. Dead by dawn is a great line for a horror movie. It is a terrible line for a dashboard.