I know YOU (Rosco) know, but for others that may not and are reading this; The flex antennas should be presented parallel to the antennas not across them ( the xFD you would use to lay across to get a visual idea of where the antenna lays beneath )
3rd bus, passenger-facing reader (newer model), no read
Okay I’m at work.
For the record, I tried long and hard on all three readers, slowly sliding the implant “card” right and left and up and down across the round put-it-there ring of LEDs on the front face of the readers - much to the suspicion of all 3 drivers. I got no response whatsoever.
I’m not surprised: sometimes even with the full-size card, when it’s in the outer compartment of my glove (which adds 2 mm of thickness tops) it’s a hard read.
I’ll try something else on my way back home tonight: the card sleeves supplied by the PTA seem to have some kind of metallic-looking backing. In the off chance that it is interfering, I’ll tape the implant to my hand and try to get a read through my glove. But I’m 99% sure it won’t work neither.
Sooo… so far it looks like a very expensive failed experiment 
No point in doing any of that. If it doesn’t work easily (hell, at all) in the bus, it’s just not usable. No amounts of experimenting in stationary busses - assuming I could even do that - will change that.
Bus #4: driver’s reader, thin transparent non-metallic sleeve, chip pushed hard against the reader (driver extremely suspicious), no read.
Bus #5, passenger-facing new-style reader, chip stacked against a field detector card (in case the reader needed a wake-up load), no read.
This is officially hopeless. Maybe I’ll contact the PTA to ask permission to investigate their readers in a less sneaky fashion…
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Could you sneak a photo of the reader? If it’s a small local TA it’s probably just rebranded ware from a larger company - so we could help you find some info
ReaderS - they have at least 3 models in the wild, possibly 4.
I’ll try to shoot pictures next time I ride the bus. Right now the weather has turned warm enough that I’m dying to drag my velomobile out of storage and sneak in some miles before the temperatures drop again next week.
Hmm… I just rode the bus this morning, and I noticed the readers in the buses have changed. They seem to be the same brand, but perhaps the new ones have more range than the old ones.
Time to pull my failed bus card conversion our of retirement and give it another whirl.
Since the original card is also 17pf, you could potentially use one of these antenna I designed. Might be an upgrade from the wire antenna.
Interesting… Maybe, if it looks like I could use just a bit of a performance boost to make it work okay on the new reader.
The problem with the old readers was that the performances were abysmal even with full-size cards. Probably on purpose too. It was so bad I couldn’t read my bus card through a thin glove half of the time. An implant would never have stood a chance. I’m hoping they cranked the power up in the new readers.
I’ll do some testing. But your antenna certainly could be an option.
Yeah, that won’t look suspicious at all!
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Okay I did some tests with the “new” readers this morning and… I got busted.
The problem is, I don’t know what happened, but after 8 months, the chloro baggie sort of dried up inside and ballooned up, and now my fake travel card looks like a turgid whale on cortisone. Sure enough, when I presented the “card” to the reader and started searching for the sweet spot, the driver got suspicious, told me to hand over the card and saw what was inside the sleeve.
Anyway, long story short, I explained what it was and what I was trying to do. He told me he should throw me off the bus and take my name for further action, since although the chip is legit, the fake card is an obvious attempt at deception. But seeing as though I had another card that’s unmodified and valid, and the guy was reasonably amused, he let me off the hook.
Since he was in the know, I took the opportunity to ask him what the hell was wrong with those reader. He told me they never worked quite right. Matter of fact, they recently added the ability to pay for bus tickets with a credit card inside the bus, and they had to install a separate reader just for that. And indeed, just on the side of the main reader, there’s a separate one for contactless payments that I hadn’t spotted 
Talk about inefficient.
Anyway, if the customer service office is open this afternoon at the main station, I’ll show them the implant for what it is and I’ll ask them if they don’t mind letting me do some testing on one of the buses (or on their terminal if they have one). Worst case, they’ll seize the implant and report me. But at this point, it’s as good as useless anyway, so I might as well give it a shot.
Also, it means that I might have a sort of a bus card inside me now: if my payment conversion works with the payment terminal, I could just buy my bus tickets with it. I have to see how that works with connections, and of course it’s nowhere as cheap as a season pass, but it’s an option.
I’m so trying this this afternoon
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This is just foreign as all heck to me… similar to the violent ignorance of Idiocracy where anything you don’t understand is a threat. Ironically I’d expect that attitude from people here in the USA, but honestly if the machine go beep they DGAF generally speaking. I’ve never had issues gladly showing people what I was trying to do and talk about it as “technology we are developing”… everyone here seems gleefully intrigued.
Like… report you to whom exactly? The school principal? Honestly this is sounding like such “nanny state” bullshit… and that’s actually quite the statement coming from me since I typically despise people spouting “nanny state bullshit” to describe actually useful and beneficial social programs that keep neighborhoods and neighbors from slipping into catastrophic pits of dystopian poverty.
Dare I say… muh … muhh… muh freedums!!! Me luv muh freedums 'merica!
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Calm the fuck down and doff your 'Murican freedom-hell-yeah hat dude
I did try to go about it sneaky-sneaky. Maybe I should have been more open about it. But consider this: if you were a Finnish bus driver, and some shoeless guy you don’t know who speaks Finnish like a Mexican cow boards your bus with some suspicious piece of electronics bathing in a strange liquid and asks you whether he can fuck around with the bus ticket reader for a minute, with other people waiting to board the bus and you trying to keep your schedule, would you let him?
As for the reporting bit, it’s not as sinister as you think. It’s not allowed to modify cards, and the drivers are told to confiscate funky cards for destruction and invalidation, and for the PTA to decide whether the infraction warrants further legal action for some reason. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that.
I’d have read your post but I’m blinded by all the freedom
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So I’ll chime in also because stuff like this irks me,
If the payment reader accepts your implant they might be in a tricky spot, there’s not much they can reasonably do to stop that, short of getting card processor involved and I question they would deactive a card on such a claim
Additionally… if the implant winds up working… does the bus driver have the ability to differentiate the scans? Because if not… what’s he going to do? Cut you open to “confiscate it?”
I don’t see what they can do about it, nor do I see how they would care. Payment cards are an externality to them: if it goes beep, they shouldn’t care how it went beep anymore than my local supermarket or my local booze joint does. For all they know, my payment implant is legit and valid.
I.e. they’re not the payment “police”. They just use a payment service to get money.
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Hipotheticaly speaking, what would happen if someone uses a perfectly legit card in combination with some funky electronics? Would they confiscate everything or just the card?
I assume that getting confused and trying a card from another country wouldn’t be a problem however.
Quite ironically, I know of a public transport system of which there are rumors of fraud with the cards… And IIRC, they where using original MIFARE classic chips. Abused with legit cards I guess?
You can find violent ignorance of Idiocracy in every country. Maybe this occurs when people are in the middle ground between not knowing and of not fully understanding what things are.
And this worries me a bit as I want to see more augmentation technologies get developed. Some future ones might even be visible and obvious. Needless to say that I don’t want to see transhumanists being attacked…