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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

You could enforce this by making a farday cage out of the building. I looked into this for an irrational (5G is government poison) family member. I wasn't going to debate how RF works, just buy some points by helping her indulge her fantasy. But actual RF blocking copper mesh material is very expensive. I wonder if this could be done via wallpaper and printing using a conductive ink printed on the same pattern?

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Linus Tech Tips made a Faraday cage out of an employee's house using graphite-based EMF-blocking paint. MMS messages with images couldn't be sent from within the house, although text messages and phone calls went through. They didn't do anything to treat the windows, though, so maybe if you combine the paint with some sort of fine wire mesh over the windows you'd get a more comprehensive blocking effect.

At $200/gallon, the cost of the paint would also be a major consideration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5BOFsiDpYQ

For those near the SF Bay Area, the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, with its copper-cladded exterior, is an excellent instance of this.

I suspect that the effect was unintentional, but (at least until internal WiFi access was provided) the consequences were delightful.

Any metallic grid should attenuate signals effectively. Old-school lathe-and-plaster construction (which often incorporates a wire mesh) is well-known WiFi / cellular poison:

<https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-get-a-wifi-signal-...>

You really don't need a full on faraday cage. Signals in the phone frequency range are pretty poor at penetration, especially brick or concrete. I once lived in a house with lath and plaster walls, and I had to leave the office door open to even get wifi in there.

Perhaps some well placed metallic material on or near the windows would suffice?

>I wonder if this could be done via wallpaper and printing using a conductive ink printed on the same pattern?

AFAIK they have to be grounded so it'll be a massive pain to install, even if you can get it printed.

Last I checked there was no consensus on whether or not a Faraday cage needed to be grounded to function properly, which seemed surprising.

Well, what does it mean to be "grounded". There isn't something special about the voltage potential of Earth.

If a Faraday cage blocks interstellar signals only if one part of it is stuck in a ball of mud and rock... well, I have some questions.

There is the possibility of the ground being a return path to the transmitter, but if that were effective, radio infrastructure would interfere world-wide, and you could transmit through the earth's core. And even that argument would suggest that the Faraday cage should be floating, not grounded.

A large cage probably doesn’t need to be grounded to prevent a relatively weak signal from escaping, as attenuation would be high due to the amount of material involved. Smaller cages may radiate the signal after some attenuation.

Edit: reading some more about it, cages that are close to the radiating element may experience capacitive coupling, and this is what can cause an ungrounded cage to serve as an antenna. A larger cage, with the radiating element farther away from the cage, is less likely to experience this. In either case grounding should reduce this risk.

Just a typical metal mesh building material can do it. My friend has a house with an accidental Faraday cage like that. 0 bars unless you're near a window, 90% packet loss if you're near a window but not sticking the phone outside. Wifi only works if you're LOS to the access point.

SImilar, except their belief is part of a illness that's some kind of dementia. It went further into all kinds of radiations, including things that are meaningless, like the 911 frequency.

It degraded slowly over a decade. It's "stabilized" but just a bunch of word salad.

I'm so frustrated with her. she believes any health conditions are either a result of RF emanation or "the jab. Her brain is completely unaccountable for illnesses incurred by those before RF or vaccines. It's infuriating, but telling her she's wrong won't help. It reminds me of the advice to never tell a paranoid schizophrenic they are delusional. It just makes you part of their opposition.

Just run a jammer - much easier and just as illegal - although if you use a busted microwave from the 80s it gives you good plausible deniability.

Faraday cages are passive and not illegal. Jamming is.

>although if you use a busted microwave from the 80s it gives you good plausible deniability.

Not every radio runs off 2.4G, the frequency that microwaves would affect. Even for wifi there's 5ghz and 6ghz bands. For cellphones there are far more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands

"just"

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