for today's episode of kick farted we'll
be investigating the claims made by Shield headwear a company that
specializes in fashionable RF shielding
apparel to keep your head safe from the harmful radiation that is all around us
in this digital age they say with their
Shield head wear signals are hundreds of
times lower inside with the shielding effect maxing out at 60 DB which would
mean 99 99% of the incident radiation is blocked
sounds impressive right I mean I guess so but since I'm not an engineer a
biologist or why does anyone listen to me anyway
the point is I'm not going to weigh in on whether RF radiation is harmless or
the next coming of Satan himself or somewhere in between that's beyond the
scope of this video what I am going to do is travel to Vancouver Island to
investigate these CL with Katarina gustavs an EMF consultant
with a special interest in RF radiation who notably is one of the certified
Consultants listed on Shield head wear's own website though I doubt after this
video she'll be there much
longer Intel skull Canyon knck features
a sixth generation core i7 quad coreu processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more
at the link in the video description so we're not in a lab here strictly
speaking but we believe that we've created a test environment that's as
good or better than the one used by Shield headwear so to give you some idea
of how much control we have over our environment with this Ultra Broadband
antenna our background RF level is around 3.5 microwatt per square meter
thanks to our location halfway up Mount Ma so there's hardly even cell phone
service here compared to on the top of the mountain where the radar pulses can
hit 10,000 microwatt per square meter or more this is Wilderness folks moving on
to our gear the first thing we need is our trusty HF 59b RF meter from
gigahertz Solutions this is the same one used in the testing done by Shield
headware but it should be noted that our setup for it is a little different we're
using the more accurate and better shielded log periodic antenna
that is included with the HF 59b it's actually very unclear to us why Shield
headware opted for the one that normally ships with gigahertz Solutions lower-end
model since mixing and matching can deliver unreliable readings and while
Shield is using the 2.4 GHz mode to
filter out anything but 2.4 gig Wi-Fi signals we're using a high pass filter
to cut off anything below 800 MHz though
since there is so little background RF here this is effectively the same thing
so for our first trick we need a baseline reading on a bog standard home
router I grabbed the dlink dir 655 at a distance of 1 and 1/2 M we're
looking at peaks of around 2.2 Mills per square meter with no connected clients
it should be noted that due to its nature a Wi-Fi signal will always be
kind of Jumpy like this rather than giving us a solid reading since a hat
can be worn a number of different ways for the sake of thess we decided to try
several different ways for our router to wear the toque or beanie beginning with
kind of loosely to represent what it might be like if it didn't entirely
cover the source of the RF radiation and in this scenario we observed a 10x
decrease not too shabby but not exactly
hundreds of times better either our second hat position has most of the
antennas covered and we see another significant Improvement in the signal
blocking effectiveness of the Hat leading us to our third measurement
where we carefully cover the entire antenna array and we are able to
reproduce the results demonstrated in Shield head wear's video but there's a
problem with this while the general rules for this meter are to use as
coarse a scale as you have to but as fine a scale as possible and for
comparative measurements you should stay within the same scale if we use only
only the course measurement like they did we would think that we've gotten all
the way down to 2 microwatt per square meter just because that's what it
displays in the course reading mode we actually have to switch to the Fine mode
to get a more accurate reading oops 100
microwatt per square meter so then what would it take to get to the 2 microwatt
reading from Shield head wear's video we tried wrapping a second beanie on the
router being careful to eliminate gaps in the coverage in an attempt to
simulate the effect of a faraday cage and it turns out that yes while this
method of wearing the product isn't particularly fashionable or comfortable
the silver fabric material being used is
capable of the results they demonstrated but radiation shielding
products I mean these are things that are commercially available and have actually engineering that go into them
are as much about the design as they are about the materials choice I mean
titanium is a strong material but it
wouldn't be a very good idea to wear a solid titanium motorcycle helmet for
what I'd like to think are fairly obvious reasons so back then to Shield
headwear we've recreated their test and
demonstrated that their beanie is not as effective at blocking RF radiation as
they think it is when used in the manner demonstrated in their video but frankly
that isn't even the main issue here let's pick through some of the other
problems by their own admission the material
reflects signals so when short of sticking your
head into a microwave oven which isn't recommended by the way the biggest
source of the signals your headware is supposed to be blocking is the phone
that you've got your face buried into why did they put a concave reflector in
the case of the baseball cap right above your face and why are they ignoring the
findings of these MIT students who determined that wearing a tinf foil hat
actually resulted in a 30 D or 1,000
fold amplification of 2.6 GHz signals
when transmitted to the cranium from
receivers outside I mean as they do
point out on their website the signals won't shoot around inside your skull
like lightsabers but will be mostly absorbed
by the various layers of tissue in your head but like isn't that the point of
this stuff that we don't want that and
somehow their own mention of the Inconvenient Truth that a true signal
blocking device would cover the head from top to bottom that doesn't stop
them from claiming that their hat is a personal bodyguard against radiation and
that it doesn't need to be grounded because Faraday cages don't need to be
grounded which one is it you guys I mean
on top of that the RF meter that they and we are using is not for measuring in
the so-called near field Zone anyway
like inside of a hat with a smartphone next to it the way people use phones
making everything that we're testing completely meaningless anyhow and
finally they specifically make a point of mentioning that their headwear is not
just a tinf foil hat and we could have
pointed out the misspelling of signal proof on their website as an indication
they aren't strong fact Checkers but for good measure we tested that too and
whipped up a Frugal and Imo quite stylish aluminum foil hat tested it and
hot damn it works even better so there you have it I'm still
not qualified to say whether Wi-Fi signals are harmful or not I will leave
that to the scientists but what I can say with confidence is that if you want
to protect yourself from them my homemade solution is just as good as the
30 to 40 Euro one that you can buy on Shield head wear.com though you should
know that both of these types of shielding hats may not work as intended
and may even increase your RF exposure
to your head derp so thanks for watching
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farted on the Neptune Pine a wrist mounted phone that's as dumb as it
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