After locals complain of poor signal, California cops raid home to find 5G jammer device

On the good-news side of the equation, Uncle Charlie does not take kindly to people deliberately jamming the airwaves, and they have a long history of meting out serious fines and punishments for violators. With luck, the idiot who ran this will be given years of prison time to serve as a warning to other anti-5G people with similar ideas.

Oh, and to any anti-5G people who may be reading this: radio emissions follow the Inverse Square Law, which means the closer you are to a transmitter, the more RF you are exposed to. A jammer in the same house as you exposes you to far more powerful radiation* than you could possibly get from a nearby cell tower.

As a bonus, if you’re the type who believes “cell phone radiation causes health issues,” a jammer emits signals on a wider band of frequencies than an ordinary transmitter. In the unlikely event you are physiologically capable of having an adverse reaction to a low power signal at a specific frequency, a jammer is far more likely to emit the bad frequency than a controlled transmitter.

* Non-ionizing radiation, which is not the same thing as nuclear radiation.

EDIT Inverse Square Law, not Inverse Cube Law.

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Maybe one will melt a chocolate bar and invent the miQwave oven…

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What I find astounding it is that it’s only $120.

At that price it joins high power lasers as something that idiots who don’t realize the consequences of their action can afford.

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Best Boing Boing Shop post ever!

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If someone in that city had a medical emergency and could not contact first responders and suffered for it, this idiot would be looking at waaay more jail time.

Of course, since they’re in the U. S. where our unofficial motto is “it’s all about me” this comes as no surprise.

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and

It seems to me that the guy who lives in the house with the big black box that has a half dozen antennas sticking out of it and is labeled “Signal Jammer” might be a good person to investigate. But maybe that just comes from me watching too many cop shows on TV.

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Treadin’ that fine line between curious and stupid is my thing.


Honestly impressed that you can take down a significant area for $120.

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Hope those were rare, mask-wearing cops, because I’m gonna take a stab and say that resident is unvaccinated

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This looks like the kind of jammer that is sometimes bought and deployed by prisons to prevent inmates from using smuggled cell phones, and possibly to jam remotely controlled drones.

The frequencies they jam are not the VHF frequencies used by the guard or police radios, so they don’t interfere with the normal operation of the place.

Theoretically they’re just as illegal in a prison as they are in a neighborhood, but unofficially nobody cares because the USA loves its prisons and hates its prisoners.

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Why do I keep reading “Qnut” as Qunt

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So I live in a very pro that last guy that was president county. Many flags still flying and a few f**k Biden flags.

I won’t block signals because I’m afraid of jail but…

I do have a couple old routers that can each broadcast 5 SSIDs. In my neighborhood when they search for open networks, because stealing is okay when they do it, they find a bunch of pro democrat anti nut job networks.

It amuses the crap out of me.

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Obligatory:

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Especially the description. Better than the usual BB store copy:

Here we have an excellent device for you. Just have a look to understand what it is from the Texin brand. Did you get what it is? I think you got it. Yes, you are right that it is a signal jammer produced by the Texin named Texin BG-E8 which is crucial from different perspectives. If you are in search of a fantastic signal jammer by you can work properly, then I should say that you are in the right place. You don’t need to go anywhere else to find another one. Let me make you understand some of the great features and functionalities of the Texin signal jammer.

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Bars like to buy them too… They get fined by Fat Cousin Charlie when they get caught.
The specs SAY this thing is only supposed to work to about 20 meters… So why was it wiping out such a large area? Modified?

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Why would it be inverse cube and not inverse square? My understanding is inverse cube is only for dipoles like magnets, not actual emissions. :confused:

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It kind of sounds like, from the article, that maybe no one was at home when police came by, and they’ve said nothing about any arrests, which makes me think the occupant of the home might not have shown up yet (at least when they were around) or otherwise made themselves obvious. Either that, or they’re still building their case before charging anyone, which involves collecting information such as how long this has been going on, how many people were affected, etc.

There was more than one, and they were right next to at least one comms tower, which I suspect played a part in why they were so effective.

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There is an elaborate pseudoscience around the toxicity of the signal itself; they (some of them, anyway) think random noise is fine. It’s a way of helping the mythology evade the science.

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I mean, there’s no telling what things those signals could be carrying.

Improper uses of the internet

That said, we have survived AM radio this long.

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Was there really a person living there, or was the apartment rented just to place the jammers?

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Unless you’re Viacom, then you can jam the waves as much as you want with all kinds of shit, like 55 minutes of ads for every hour of music.

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