💾 Archived View for stack.tilde.cafe › gemlog › 2022-05-17.cell.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:17:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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There is a brief mention that 'for some reason, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are super unreliable' in the author's apartment:
gemini://gemini.dimakrasner.com/blueman-notifications.gmi
Walking around any large city (NYC in particular), my eyes are drawn up to the cell (mobile) antennas attached to buildings, especially residential buildings. These used to be on rooftops, but lately, they are plastered along walls of the top floors. Some corners bristle with so many antennas that I can't help but feel sorry for the poor chap whose bedroom wall is transmitting hundreds of watts of microwave radiation. Headaches? Feeling a bit hot at night?
I am not (entirely) kidding: microwave oven on low may put out a couple of hundred watts; a cell phone struggling to reach a tower, maybe 3 watts, through your brain, and will get hot in your hand. So you get to cook your brain _very_ slowly. But living behind a microwave antenna array -- all bets are off.
Antenna design is a bit of a dark art. It is entirely possible that a minute deviation from specified cavity size creates a vortex behind it, one that concentrates quite a bit of energy, not detectable without special equipment. Is it possible that a dozen of nearby radiating antennas interfere with each other to create a high-powered standing wave node behind the array on some subharmonic frequency? Does not sound impossible to me.
Living in the age of the Internet means that you have to accept that, while someone knows the answers, your chances of finding truth in the haystack of self-promoting assholes is virtually nil. Are people attention-seeking or genuinly dying of cancer from nearby antennas? Is that study that microwaves are totally safe bought and paid for by T-Mobile? Who the **** knows.
Same with equipment - try to buy something even remotely obscure (maybe a water purity meter, or some equipment to test ambient noise level) - you will be buying crap, cheap junk masquerading as real equipment for the rest of the year, until you give up in disgust. Microwave testing gear for non-pros is one of these things - the carnies will take you. Even if you spend a lot of money your chances of buying junk are high, and unless you are a well-funded startup you probably cannot afford the real gear used by engineers.
Older 3G as well as 5G cell equipment has bands close enough to 2.4GHz used by Bluetooth and older Wi-Fi equipment; it is entirely plausible that cell transmitters are causing interferance.