It's serious stuff. My guess is that he's got his television on an ungrounded extension cord which is very long. At some points on the cord you will find a standing wave ranging from 10 hertz all the way up to a gigahertz. Once there is a powercord emmission at say one foot, every multiple of one foot will give a harmonic at a multiple of the original signal. Much like when you turn on your blender or vacum cleaner and it interferes with your AM Radio or television set. The longer the power cord the worse the radiated powercord emmissions become.
If you set down a little hard it can set off the alarm. It might be wise for the next pilot of the club plane to check the skin for wrinkles a little more diligently during the walk-around preflight.
The cord cannot generate such waves on its own, even if it is long enough to comprise multiple electrical subwavelengths of ELT RF frequencies. The set would have to be dumping that energy into the power cord, which would mean the decoupling of the AC power cord would not meet FCC standards for receiving equipment.
The bypass/choke decoupling system Samsung uses might be defective, or even may have accumulated random resonances that actually boosted coupling between the cord and unwanted RF. But what power level would be available for radiation into space? A few milliwatts (good grief, I hope not!)? With the radiator (power cord) laying on a floor, presumably, without benefit of a counterpoise of any sort, the SWR between the signal source and the antenna would be rather high. That would mean high ohmic losses, as RF current recirculated between generator and feedpoint repeatedly. Add to that radiation path losses, and very quickly beyond a few wavelengths form the antenna the signal will be unrecoverable by any but receivers with negative noise figures. Do ELT receivers a few hundred miles above earth enjoy even 0 noise figure front ends?
I'll stick to urban legend status for this story.
Emergency freqs are 121.5 and 243.0
I wonder he's got cabble TV and he's using it with the incoming cable TV line plugged directly into it.
Sometimes a poorly designed TV set (or poorly-constructed TV cable with poorly-installed connectors) will radiate the incoming cable TV signals, which range in frequency from 50MHz on up to 550MHz, 750MHz, or even 860MHz for the newest systems.
This signals do encompass the range used for aviation. In fact, the FCC will fine the cable company if they leak too much signal.