Gadgetory

for today's episode of kick farted we'll be investigating the claims made by shield head we're 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 where signals are hundreds of times lower inside with the shielding effect maxing out at 60 decibels which would mean 99.999% of the incident radiation is blocked sounds impressive right I mean I guess so but since I'm not an engineer a biologist or what 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 claims with Catarina Gustav's an EMF consultant with a special interest in RF radiation who notably is one of the certified consultants listed on shield Head where's old website though I doubt after this video she'll be there much longer intel skull canyon nook features a 6th generation Core i7 quad-core 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 microwatts per square meter thanks to our location halfway up now matheson 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 microwatts per square meter or more this is wilderness folks moving on to our gear the first thing we need is our trusty hf 59 b RF meter from gigahertz solutions this is the same one used in the testing done by shield headwear 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 59 b it's actually very unclear to us why shield headwear 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 gigahertz 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 megahertz 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 a d-link dir-655 at a distance of one and a half meters we're looking at peaks of around 2.2 million watts 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 thoroughness we decided to try several different ways for our router to wear the two core 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 wares 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 the course measurement like they did we would think that we've gotten all the way down to two micro watts 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 a hundred micro watts per square meter so then what would it take to get to the two micro watt reading from shield head where's video we tried wrapping a second beanie on the router being careful to eliminate any 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 head where we've recreated their test and demonstrated that their beanie is not as effective at blocking RF radiation as they think it 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 head where 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 tinfoil hat actually resulted in a 30 decibel or 1000 fold amplification of 2.6 gigahertz 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 ground at 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 head wear is not just a tinfoil 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 whipped up a frugal and imo quite stylish aluminum foil hat tested it and hot dad 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 where calm 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 guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy this stuff we've featured in the video description maybe don't buy this stuff that's okay you can just go to the link and buy something else also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner if you haven't already seen our last episode of kick farted on the Neptune pine a wrist mounted phone that has dumb as it sounds