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I think my Grandpa worked on the mentioned classified experiments in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. He was a Naval Academy graduate with a degree in electrical engineering and spent several years on submarines. He then spent several years working at the Pentagon in late 50s and throughout the 60s (my mother was born in Bethesda in 72).
He took those secrets to his grave. I could never get it out of him what he did that was classified. Although I did find several books and research papers in his basement about sonar and radio communications…
Anyways, great article that gave me a bit more insight into what my Grandpa might have been up to.
> In the summer of 1917, he was arranging various types of coil antennas at a receiver test site on the Chesapeake Bay when he accidentally dropped one of the antennas into the water. Strangely enough, the radio receiver connected to the antenna continued to provide good reception even as it sank into the bay.
We (as an industry) have repurposed this technology for what's called Electromagnetic Measurement While Drilling telemetry. We break modern drill strings with a "gap sub", which is basically just a piece of iron with a ceramic insulated thread, into a "crappy dipole" which then if we impart 2-30W of power through roughly a Class D amp we can generate a signal that goes through most formations of the earth to the surface from over 5 miles underground from the transmitting source. Transmit frequencies are generally 2-10hz, sometimes pushing 32+hz. It's a fascinating use of the tech. If building in this industry sounds awesome to you, feel free to drop me a line. ken _at_ erdosmiller _dot_ com.
RF Science is fascinating. Now might be a good time to ask; Does anybody have any recommendations on scientific books/papers/articles on the effects of RF spectrum (all frequencies) on Human Biology and Physiology? There is a lot of nonsense/hysteria out there but i would like to know the actual experimental evidence and science.
The Hunt for Red October is fiction but Clancy did his homework on submarine comms. For actual depth, Friedman's naval electronics histories are dense but thorough. Expect to take notes.
computer.rip has dozens of rabbit hole articles that seem to be tied together in an "old tech / weird tech" bundle. I'd love to find a book on similar subjects too.
It's crazy that they're using radio frequencies that are within the range of human hearing... Obviously sound and RF are different things, but it puts into perspective how a "high" sound is a very "low" frequency ;)
For someone interested in this topic and happens to pass by, I can highly recommend a visit to Grimeton Radio Station[1], Sweden, which is still operational.
The extreme lower edge could be said to fall around 7 Hz, where the wavelength of a radio signal matches the circumference of the earth.
Those are rookie numbers. Ok so not the same, but headline made me think of NANOGrav first, which uses minute shifts in pulsar timings to detect gravitational waves in the nano-Hz range[1].
The submission was about subs rather, and quite interesting as such.
The ELF system was found to cause problems ranging from flickering light bulbs to phantom telephone ringing, and the Navy installed additional grounding and filtering on public utilities throughout the area at its own expense—even reimbursing the utilities for administrative costs related to customer complaints.
Yea that surely helped drive some ghost stories and paranoid delusions.
HDBaseT operates at 100MHz+. ELF is 3-30Hz. Not sure what connection was being drawn there, but the frequency ranges are about seven orders of magnitude apart. Some comments are better left detached.
Good catch, but the practical issue is getting someone in crisis to actually navigate Medicaid enrollment mid-episode. We've seen it at our clinic — the coverage exists on paper but the gap between "covered" and "treated" is where people fall through.
That's entire unrelated to ELF. The frequencies used by Sharp were in the VHF to UHF bands, and the effect just plain doesn't work at the rock bottom of the spectrum used by ELF and VLF.
This highlights a huge problem that ELF faced: Most people don't understand this stuff at all, and cannot tell the difference. On the other hand, the researchers and Navy were always very reluctant to go into the specifics of the technology, for military secrecy concerns. Beyond the sensible secret keeping, this always results in a much larger vague area where people don't want to talk even though nothing serious would be leaked because the laws are strict and figuring out the exact limits of what's classified is itself fraught.
So if on the other side you got people who are chaining together all the even vaguely EMF-related news and discoveries, and associating it all with a huge military secret project that no-one wants to talk about, and on the other side you got a bunch of people who actually know what's going on but are unwilling to give straight answers to even relatively simple questions because they are scared of accidentally divulging some key details that are classified, lots of people drew the frankly reasonable conclusion that there is something rotten here.
To put it simply, the kind of massive transmitters used by ELF and VLF projects would not be useful for working in the bands where the Frey effect works. The most efficient antennas are half- or quarter-wavelength, which for the Frey effect would be somewhere around 10-20cm (4-8 inches).
The Sharp microwave auditory effect works because the skull acts as a resonant cavity -- you're essentially inducing thermoelastic expansion in cranial tissue. At ELF the wavelengths are thousands of kilometers, the power densities required would be absurd, and the "receiverless" framing breaks down completely. Completely different physical mechanism.
He took those secrets to his grave. I could never get it out of him what he did that was classified. Although I did find several books and research papers in his basement about sonar and radio communications…
Anyways, great article that gave me a bit more insight into what my Grandpa might have been up to.