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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like it is smack in the middle of a large area where Broadcast TV, WiFi, and cellphones aren't allowed. Given the prevalence of those things in everyday life you wonder how that effects the properties value regardless of the location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

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Broadcast TV can be replaced with cable, WiFi can be (mostly) replaced with a good ethernet network in the home - it would have to be properly wired and I doubt powerline would cut it.

However no cell phones. I'm guessing landlines and VoIP are popular.

Kids would go berserk in a setting like that, can you imagine? No Instagram, Snapchat, games, and on and on. Can smartphones even be plugged directly into an Ethernet socket? They only have USB ports AFAIK.

Any parent with kids >10yo who moves there with them will soon wish they had torn down the house and built a Faraday cage they can put Wifi into instead...

> Can smartphones even be plugged directly into an Ethernet socket?

Yup. I've done this with my Nexus 5. You need a USB OTG cable and a USB Ethernet adapter. Dorkiest thing ever, walking around the apartment trailing an Ethernet cable, but page-loads were pretty snappy, all right...

Neat. I should've guessed that there would be a USB adapter. Is it plug-and-play or does it require additional drivers?

I'm pretty sure it was plug-and-play. It's actually kind of cool how many USB peripherals Android natively supports -- keyboards, mice, flash drives, etc...

Of course; under the hood it's just Linux. Though Google has replaced most of the userspace drivers and stuff are still the same good old Linux ones.

I lived in the NRQZ and had no knowledge of the fact until maybe a year ago, long after I left. Some of the commenters here are ridiculous; we had cell phones, wifi, microwaves, radios, and probably anything else people here have come up with. I'll grant that the cell service was never great, but I always figured that was more a function of living in a pretty rural place (town of 20k).

There is wifi at Snowshoe. I'm sure you could get away with home wifi if you kept it low-power. AT&T has even nerfed its network to allow limited cell phone usage. More: http://fusion.net/story/243321/wtf-wifi-in-the-green-bank-wv...

If you make your house a faraday cage would you be allowed to use WiFi?

Microwaves are not allowed, because for the fraction of a second between you opening the door and the generator switching off there is always a tiny leakage of microwave energy - and it has actually set off radars in sensitive areas in the past. So to answer your question - probably not.

So using a microwave but always using the timer or stop button is fine?

Sure, but I guess one wouldn't be allowed in anyway.

I really have no idea why I got downvoted couple times - what I said is perfectly true:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

Edit: and now downvotes on this post, despite containing nothing else but a link. Would anyone care to explain what is going on?

I can't speak to why people downvoted the first post (I upvoted it), but it's generally frowned upon to complain about people downvoting you.

> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know where you got this idea, the NRQZ encompasses a huge area and people most definitely do have microwave ovens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

You think that nobody in a city the size of Harrisonburg VA has a microwave?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrisonburg,_Virginia

It's within a 1 mile radius of the radio astronomy dish that petrol engined cars (spark plugs) and emitters like microwaves are banned.

You can install licensed point to point microwave radio and VHF/UHF radio systems, etc in the NRQZ, you just need to go through a coordination process.

https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt/interference-protect...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11748758

If you did it properly, there's no way they could catch you so in practice the answer is probably yes.

EDIT: Looks like anything goes if it doesn't cause unacceptable levels of noise http://fusion.net/story/243321/wtf-wifi-in-the-green-bank-wv...

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