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Comment by Thorondor | Hacker News Reader

Probably safer to let somebody else try this... ;) A couple of Ukrainians made a cool YouTube video recently where they built something similar and used it to blow up some cell phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIU8WZR9DNA

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The video is lovely (and now I absolutely want to try it at home!). That said, the ending disturbed me. As I understood, it basically said - "don't worry, none of our neighbours suffered, because they all moved out when the war started".

EDIT:

Holy shit, they have a video of what's left of their town after shelling stopped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4mc5mHksl8.

You really don't want to microwave a Lithium-Ion battery.

Oh yeah I do!

(From a distance. With a camera running...)

(It can't be much worse than all the times I've smashed LiPo batteries into the ground (or a tree or another quad) at 80+mph... They only _rarely_ "vigorously discharge" as a result of that. I'm pretty careful the next few times I recharge one after a particularly violent crash...)

I think they've been using it on Samsung Note 7s more recently.

They seem to have absolutely no sense of self preservation.

Can they really expose their hand to that (below the temperate at which they get a burn) with no internal/hidden damage whatsoever?

It's not ionizing radiation, so the only damage is from the heat. So they probably can expose their hand without damage.

Just because it's non-ionizing doesn't mean it's safe. HERF will simply cook you, and just like your kitchen microwave oven it will cook the strongest at the antinodes. This means you can get very nasty burns inside your hand that don't show on the surface.

Just being near some antennas when it is transmitting can give you a very nasty RF burn. A magnetron that can damage electronics (or cause almost any visible effect) is going to do you what it does to your food.

Seriously, don't mess with high-energy RF without proper safety training. Waving around an open magnetron that could be reflecting back at you in unknown ways is incredibly dangerous.

Up the comment chain here it shows that these nutters are living in an active war zone, so safety is a relative idea when your home is being shelled by the 20th Army of the Ground Forces of the Russian Federation.

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