did you know that when your phone says 5G up there it's probably lying when I
type star pound star pound 4636 pound star pound star LTE I paid for 5G darn
it what's going on here as it turns out
corporations is a liar sometimes and this kind of trickery is one of the
reasons that we decided to spend nearly
$45,000 on an industry standard radio
frequency shielded room it will allow us to identify and debunk all kinds of
Industry connivance like this as well as test products like cell phones routers
even microwaves for things like signal range battery drain interference
Regulatory Compliance and so much more
there's just one small problem they shipped us the wrong one and they
stopped replying to our emails so now all we have is this foam a big pile of
wood some other assorted paraphernalia
and a great big project to turn this
into something usable but don't worry we got a plan for that that I'm going to
share with you along with this segue to our sponsor team group Black Friday and
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when it comes to wireless technology it's really hard to know what's going on
and it's not like you can see it which means that before we canest anything
we're going to need some specialized equipment for one thing we're going to need a 4G 5G lab kit which is
essentially a mobile network in a box that will allow us to spin up our own
access points here and then measure the performance at various frequencies
across the Spectrum with all kinds of devices be they iPhones or Samsung
Galaxies naturally we'll want to do the same thing for Home wireless equipment
be it Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and in order to
ensure that our measurements are accurate we will need an EMC chamber so let's talk about
the kind we were supposed to get for those of you in the oh 45 Grand for a
fully assembled 16x 12T EMF chamber is
actually not a ton of money that is because we bought it used wait
used no actually that is completely
normal and fine as long as it was built by reputable manufacturer these things
have no moving parts so they don't really wear out the way that you might
imagine and it's extremely common to see scientific equipment like this on its
third or fourth or fifth owner decades after it was first
built of course it doesn't really look like anything special what makes it a a
good one well this one honestly not much
it took 3 weeks to ship and not only does it not match the picture on the
website it is entirely the wrong size we ordered 16x 12 and they shipped us a
13x13 not to mention that it is in
horrible condition like seriously this thing looks like they stored it outside
look how beat up these foam panels are like what even happened to the tips on
this one and this one and this these are
the most critical part of the chamber but since it's in this state anyway I
guess nothing prevents me from cutting it open and giving you guys a little lesson about foam different kinds of
Chambers those designed for acoustic use or radio frequency
use wow this stuff is pretty heavy ah
come on open up the point is they will use different kinds of foam materials in
construction depending on their purpose ours is a high performance fire
resistant theoretically so it is pidal foam EMC
absorber EMC stands for electromagnetic
compatibility and means that it shouldn't unintentionally generate
reflect or retransmit electromagnetic interference oh that stinks of course no
material is going to be absolutely perfect in this regard which is where
the shape comes into play these pyramids aren't purely aesthetic but rather they
have a function an electromagnetic wave like a sound wave can reflect off of a
flat surface which means that if you're trying to measure the strength of a signal from a Wi-Fi router for example
with a sensor here that bounce or realistically many
bounces could interfere with your reading now to be clear acoustic and EMC
products can be flat like the acoustic panels that we mounted for col me Chris
and that will still help to reduce the energy of any waves that hit them but by
employing this shape we give the waves
multiple opportunities to bounce off of
the sides of the pyramids before hopefully being nearly fully dissipated
this elimination of bouncing waves is where an an eoic chamber gets its name
an like not any echoic like not any
Echoes not all Foams are created equal though like the highdensity foam that we
use in our super comfortable straps on the LTT backpack LTD store.com and there
are a couple of main differences between EMC foam like this and the kind that you
would find in a Sound Chamber first up while both are made of polyurethane the
density and the internal structure tends to be higher for acoustic applications
compared to what we need the second major factor is that EMC foam like ours
is carbon impregnated carbon has a lot of space in its outer electron orbitals
allowing it to absorb energy which then
gradually dissipates causing the electrons to fall back into their normal
orbitals this makes it super effective like iron at blocking electromagnetic
interference turning the entire chamber lined with this stuff into a sort of
Faraday cage sort of For Better
isolation what we should really have is high density ferite tiling that lines
the inside of the chamber but a 2X 2 in tile okay is $8 which is why comparably
sized Chambers with fite can run you into the millions of dollars that's a
yikes the good news is that we don't actually need ferite tiling ferite is
useful for blocking lower frequency waves and with it we could block signals
all the way down to 26 to 30 MHz
allowing us to test like am radios and
stuff but I suspect most of you don't really care about that sort of thing
anyway and besides without the ferite tiling we can still keep anything above
800 MHz from passing through the walls into our chamber as for extremely high
frequencies well we don't need to worry about those in here either because we've
got a 10in thick concrete building all the way around us that is going to block
them out nicely the finished chamber is going to be assembled right here and
it's going to be about this big I'm walking around inside it right now which
is a perfect fit for our consumer electronics devices along with our 4G 5G
antenna cameras and any other measuring equipment that we will need when it's
built but first story time as I already
mentioned the picture on the website didn't match what was shipped but guys
it gets way worse than that the seller never sold that chamber or even owned it
in the first place I mean we thought we were at least buying a comparable one
but it was completely different well could have been an innocent mistake
right no not so much thanks to the
contractor who ironically the seller ired to come out and build this thing
for us we got in touch with the original seller of the actual pictur chamber and
it turns out that they messaged these guys years ago telling them to remove
those photos thing is the RF industry is
pretty small and it seems like everyone knows everyone now thankfully we haven't
actually wired the money for this so the obvious course of action was hey guys uh
can you pack all this up and take it back and this I kid you not is their
response it has been months of crickets
now which I guess means I am the proud owner of many many piles and pallets of
literal garbage it's not all bad though through the assembly contractor we were
able to get in direct contact with some excellent EMC chamber manufacturers and
we're hoping that the next time we update you guys on this it'll be with great news and maybe there's a way to
make some lemonade out of the lemons the thing is the degradation of these
pyramids means that we cannot trust this
foam to evenly attenuate any RF in the interior space but it could still prove
useful for our future sound isolation chamber which will be a dual wall design
so there's no reason that we couldn't pack this stuff into the airspace
between the inner and outer walls to improve the isolation even further as
for the framing well
we can use that to put together our camera testing chamber which is going to
have consistent lighting and lots of fun little objects and test patterns that we
can take pictures of to evaluate both Standalone and smartphone integrated
cameras if I get my way it'll also have a little model train which I think would
be sick as for the rest of it well I don't
know hopefully we'll figure something out and they're not expecting us to send
this back after leaving it with us and ignoring us for months I mean the way
that I see it if they asked for it back at this point by the way you guys this
looked like a lot come come come come come come come over here it's two layers
thick no no no you got to see yeah here here can you see that it oh sorry sorry
it's two it's two layers thick so if
they ask for it back I think I'm just going to send them a storage invoice for
their garbage and it might end up being a better deal for them to simply walk
away like look I don't like to have to do it but if I have to go ruthless
business guide then I I will I will cuz this is this
ridiculous look at this it's got like tree debris on it like all over it
that's not from us we've had it inside oh we haven't tested to see if it
actually works at all for anything are you thinking what I'm thinking foam Fort
foam Fort LMG 5 we're sitting at about 60
okay okay and going into the chamber and
then wow I'm already already at 70 and
here we are while I may not be able to present the data we would collect from
this chamber to you guys as valid results just because of all the issues
with it can confirm carbon impregnated
foam definitely does a thing in fact I'm
using my onboard recorder right now that goes to the pack at my hip and we're
going to switch over to the one that I am transmitting to our camera operator
over there and you guys are going to see it's pretty bad Adam want to go ahead and close in the last
spot here we go all also you're going to
see that when I bust out of here this red SSID in the corner here is going to
go from about minus 80 two here we
go I dropped myself up to minus 50 all
right I can't wait to have an actual working one just like I can't wait to
tell you guys that you can see the full video of us building the blockport over
on Floatplane decom and oh I also can't wait to tell you about our sponsor
MSI MSI released their new GeForce RTX
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their Torx fans promise excellent longevity due to the double set of
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they bundle in a support stand that can be attached to your case to hold up the
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like the talking points so check out the RTX 490 Supreme at the link in the video
description if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the one where
we gave you guys a lab update on what's going on with keyboard testing so why
don't you go check out that one um can I actually get a hand though
just get that CL yeah CL yep no no for real like it y okay it's just at a
really weird angle I couldn't get any Leverage