Extremely Low Frequencies | Hacker News Reader

Extremely Low Frequencies

computer.rip

224 pointspinewurst46 comments

I think my Grandpa worked on the mentioned classified experiments in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. He was a Naval Academy graduate with a degree in electrical engineering and spent several years on submarines. He then spent several years working at the Pentagon in late 50s and throughout the 60s (my mother was born in Bethesda in 72).

He took those secrets to his grave. I could never get it out of him what he did that was classified. Although I did find several books and research papers in his basement about sonar and radio communications…

Anyways, great article that gave me a bit more insight into what my Grandpa might have been up to.

We (as an industry) have repurposed this technology for what's called Electromagnetic Measurement While Drilling telemetry. We break modern drill strings with a "gap sub", which is basically just a piece of iron with a ceramic insulated thread, into a "crappy dipole" which then if we impart 2-30W of power through roughly a Class D amp we can generate a signal that goes through most formations of the earth to the surface from over 5 miles underground from the transmitting source. Transmit frequencies are generally 2-10hz, sometimes pushing 32+hz. It's a fascinating use of the tech. If building in this industry sounds awesome to you, feel free to drop me a line. ken _at_ erdosmiller _dot_ com.

This stuff sounds super interesting, it’d be great if you could link to any literature that might explain more.

You can check out our podcast, it goes over a lot of the basics. https://www.erdosmiller.com/podcast

> In the summer of 1917, he was arranging various types of coil antennas at a receiver test site on the Chesapeake Bay when he accidentally dropped one of the antennas into the water. Strangely enough, the radio receiver connected to the antenna continued to provide good reception even as it sank into the bay.

is discovery ever intentional :)

"The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s Funny’"

(often attributed to Isaac Asimov, but origin is uncertain)

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/

(in short, people have found the "Eureka" part in Asimov but not the "that's funny" part)

Fantastic article.

I found a slightly clearer diagram of the Cutler array:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLF_Transmitter_Cutler#Antenna

> Therefore, the antenna cables are connected to a deicing system. When in use, it heats the wires by running a 60 Hz electric current through them. The power required to deice one array within a reasonable time is 3 MW or more – considerably higher than the transmitter output power.

I love that they de-ice the antenna array by plugging it into the grid and sending 3 megawatts into the wires

I didn’t know there was one of these in Australia, the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt.

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

The man who mysteriously disappeared whilst swimming has a Naval Communications station and a pool complex named after him?! Amazing!

As an Aussie, it’s always amused me that we managed to name a public swimming pool after a Prime Minister who (at least as the official story goes) died whilst swimming.

More info;

1) Extremely low frequency - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency

2) Communication with Submarines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

An important addendum is the subject of "Underwater Acoustic Communication" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_acoustic_communicat...

RF Science is fascinating. Now might be a good time to ask; Does anybody have any recommendations on scientific books/papers/articles on the effects of RF spectrum (all frequencies) on Human Biology and Physiology? There is a lot of nonsense/hysteria out there but i would like to know the actual experimental evidence and science.

The ARRL has some good writing on RF exposure. Basically everything I've read comes down to treating radiated RF energy as thermal risk. So it's not magic stuff that will give you cancer or cause your cells to turn inside out or something, it's just going to raise the temperature of whatever region of your body the signal is going to interact with. Could be 0.003 degrees C, could be 30 degrees C -- all that depends on the energy involved.

But that's at HF frequencies and above, not this VLF stuff which is somewhat of a different beast. Risks there are probably similar to AC mains power distribution, I would guess: touch it and get a nasty shock, don't touch it and you're fine.

Thermal effect of RF Energy (proportional to frequency) is well known. It is the reported non-thermal effects at lower frequencies eg. on cognitive function, nausea, headaches, fatigue, brain chemistry, nervous tissue, cancer etc. which seem controversial and afaik not definitively established.

However given that lower frequencies can penetrate deeper into the body, its effects on bio-electric field/currents which in turn change body chemistry may be non-trivial. Here is a WHO publication on ELF Fields - https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241572385

The DOD terms are RADHAZ and HERP (Hazards of EM Radiation to Personnel.) There is plenty of literature out there on what frequencies turn you into a microwave oven for cooking your insides, based on your length as a living antenna.

Any specific ones you would care to recommend?

PS: I found Electromagnetic Fields of Wireless Communications: Biological and Health Effects edited by Dimitris Panagopoulos.

The Jim Creek VLF station, about an hour north of Seattle, briefly mentioned in the article, is still in operation.

I would have to assume that this building is pre-targeted by many megatons of advanced weapon systems.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/w9Sr4YkFbtfKf2Fh6

https://www.navy-radio.com/commsta/jimcreek.htm

https://www.cascadepbs.org/culture/2022/07/jim-creek-harbors...

https://www.historylink.org/file/20778

these days its probably about a hundred drones hidden in a shack somewhere closeby

You are likely correct. That or in an abandoned looking tractor-trailer on one of the many rural properties surrounding the facility.

One of those topics you randomly step into and cant stop reading. Maybe someone could recommend a book that goes along these lines?

computer.rip has dozens of rabbit hole articles that seem to be tied together in an "old tech / weird tech" bundle. I'd love to find a book on similar subjects too.

It's crazy that they're using radio frequencies that are within the range of human hearing... Obviously sound and RF are different things, but it puts into perspective how a "high" sound is a very "low" frequency ;)

For someone interested in this topic and happens to pass by, I can highly recommend a visit to Grimeton Radio Station[1], Sweden, which is still operational.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimeton_Radio_Station

ELF is used as a plot tool in the Nelson DeMille novel "Wild Fire"

The extreme lower edge could be said to fall around 7 Hz, where the wavelength of a radio signal matches the circumference of the earth.

Those are rookie numbers. Ok so not the same, but headline made me think of NANOGrav first, which uses minute shifts in pulsar timings to detect gravitational waves in the nano-Hz range[1].

The submission was about subs rather, and quite interesting as such.

The ELF system was found to cause problems ranging from flickering light bulbs to phantom telephone ringing, and the Navy installed additional grounding and filtering on public utilities throughout the area at its own expense—even reimbursing the utilities for administrative costs related to customer complaints.

Yea that surely helped drive some ghost stories and paranoid delusions.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16218 (figure 9)

"In 1975, Dr. Joseph Sharp proved that correct modulation of microwave energy can result in wireless and receiverless transmission of audible speech."

That's entire unrelated to ELF. The frequencies used by Sharp were in the VHF to UHF bands, and the effect just plain doesn't work at the rock bottom of the spectrum used by ELF and VLF.

This highlights a huge problem that ELF faced: Most people don't understand this stuff at all, and cannot tell the difference. On the other hand, the researchers and Navy were always very reluctant to go into the specifics of the technology, for military secrecy concerns. Beyond the sensible secret keeping, this always results in a much larger vague area where people don't want to talk even though nothing serious would be leaked because the laws are strict and figuring out the exact limits of what's classified is itself fraught.

So if on the other side you got people who are chaining together all the even vaguely EMF-related news and discoveries, and associating it all with a huge military secret project that no-one wants to talk about, and on the other side you got a bunch of people who actually know what's going on but are unwilling to give straight answers to even relatively simple questions because they are scared of accidentally divulging some key details that are classified, lots of people drew the frankly reasonable conclusion that there is something rotten here.

To put it simply, the kind of massive transmitters used by ELF and VLF projects would not be useful for working in the bands where the Frey effect works. The most efficient antennas are half- or quarter-wavelength, which for the Frey effect would be somewhere around 10-20cm (4-8 inches).

Also, ironically for the opposition 5th gen communications networks received, 4th gen stuff operates largely in the relevant bands, but 5th gen moves to higher frequencies.

Both of those of course use a way too high frequency signal for it to be meaningfully received by the Frey effect.

and therefore I'm one of the most people. I do realize ELF & VLF ain't microwaves but I think it is somewhat related compared to other articles. point is - someone is blasting constant speech straight to heads of population and nobody is willing to do anything about it. it's 21st century yet the world we live in has gone back to Dachau methods.

Sometimes the brain’s auditory cortex can 'misfire' and create sounds or voices that feel 100% real, even when there's no outside signal. It’s actually a documented medical phenomenon.

Comparing this to Dachau suggests you’re feeling a massive amount of psychological pressure. Usually, when the mind is under extreme, prolonged stress, it can start to externalize internal thoughts as voices or 'beamed' messages. It might be worth talking to a professional about the distress this is causing you—they might have ways to help mute those signals.

There is no mechanism by which ELF or VLF could be accidentally received without physically large antennas, or very fancy signal processing. The wavelengths are just too long, VLF is 10-100km and ELF is longer. The slopes are just imperceptible. Imagine trying to notice a wave in water that's 10 km long (and not very tall). You cannot even transmit speech with ELF, it carries information so slowly it's only usable for more code or very slow digital signals.

Heterodyne systems don't let you pack more information into a lower-frequency signal, they go the other way.

Sounds like you know a thing or two which is what I appreciate. I don't know what's used and don't have a budget to perform any meaningful analysis. But I do know that GWEN towers are 30 years old tech that's capable of transmitting signal in 200mhz to whatever ghz range 200 miles afar. Frey effect according to wikipedia is audible in 200 mhz - 3 ghz range. According to James C Lin research - signal doesn't have to be strong (in fact, strong signal can get hazardous to health and used like a weapon like in Venezuela operation). Surely radio folks can match up 30 years old tech. And signal processing capabilities nowadays can get absurdly sophisticated.

What are your thoughts on FMCW radars? "Emotion recognition method using millimetre wave radar based on deep learning" research paper is what I find interesting. There also exists research paper that deals with recognition of drivers behavior (logically meaning - FMCW radars are capable of locking onto moving targets in quite long radius). From what I understood (with my limited understanding of the subject) - such radars are capable of picking up EMG signals. and according to wikipedia - EMG is enough to feed neural networks and decipher so called "silent talk" aka your inner monologue.

Those operate in the gigahertz ranges. Note that the emotion detection is done by scanning the facial expression, gigahertz range is starting to get pretty close to light, and it penetrates skin to a depth of less than a millimeter, so it can be used to draw pictures.

Not sure what you mean by "draw pictures". But I would be forever grateful if you could confirm or dismiss technical possibility of scanning EMGs remotely. It seems to be that way to me. At least to some degree which is already sufficient for stuff like neural fingerprinting (yielding individual identification and positioning in radar range) but I do lack understanding of actual physics to assess nature limits. Rest falls into place easily - Frey effect is proven science and NASA decoded EEG signals into words already back in 2003.

I'd be surprised if it were possible to directly measure muscle activity with millimetre wave radar. It looks like they're detecting motion, which is related to motor activity, of course.

EEG "spellers" c. 2000 required a cooperative participant who's actively engaged in a behavioural task: you attend to the letter/word you want to send and thereby produce a different response when it (vs the other letters) flash.

Implanted electrodes can do a lot better but it's still not something that will let someone "slurp" your thoughts out of you -- it'd be like subvocalizing them.

I do believe that signal deciphering part is somewhat solved. All the way up to real-time text stream. You can even go and run it yourself if you want to (e.g. https://github.com/CNN-for-EEG-classification/CNN-EEG). What I do struggle to find a proof of is signal gathering part. What do you think of this patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US3951134A/en ?

In case you were wondering - exactly this is what I've been listening to for 2.5 years every day 24/7 https://pastebin.com/raw/4AaidkHk it's AI generated slop in Latvian language, ran through voice synthesizer, filtered and attenuated down to hide imperfections. I do think authors have some sort of feedback mechanism whatever that may be. If not straight up "slurping thoughts", then perhaps overall emotional state changes, perhaps just heart rate - don't really have a way of telling. One thing I'm sure about is that it's external. I'm well familiar with sound, signal processing, programming. I'm also familiar with audio hallucinations - what I'm forced to experience is not that. Despite that such suffering is taking quite a toll - I don't believe it's schizophrenia (that's a whole new rabbit hole). Mainly because said disease is supposed to develop much earlier, because I've been living non-intoxicated and because whole voices thing started suddenly as per light switch (end of 2003 right when Russian Internal Revenue Service got hacked allegedly by Ukrainian hackers).

meant 2023

Another paper I find important: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6711930 What are your thoughts on radiomyography?

If you have a look at the paper, their antennas are designed to operate between 902-928 MHz, and they test for response at 600MHz-1200MHz, with it attenuating very quickly away from the peak at 900MHz. This is, again, an entirely different thing from VLF and ELF, which operate below 30kHz, at frequencies 20000 times lower.

Different indeed. Sorry about that - it's just that with voices in head there's barely any other priority in your life. Have a nice day.

also - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodyne

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