Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “There goes all my phone sponsorships…”.
After 10 days of construction, our brand new EMC chamber is done. I can’t wait to show this to you guys, watch this. Here’S all the wireless networks that are around here. They just closed the door behind us, but it takes about five seconds for your phone to go.
Oh no! Actually I can’t see any of those anymore and then maybe a couple more seconds and it’s gon na go ha. I got absolutely nothing. Zip, zilch, NADA! This is going to open up a whole new world of testing that would have been completely impossible for us before, like how good is the reception on the latest iPhone? Is your new TV making your controllers disconnect? Is your ISP provided Wi-Fi router, really so bad? You have to replace it with one of these, but wait a second. You might think. Why would you spend weeks and thousands of dollars building this when you could just follow this simple guide from Frank tifano, on building a Wi-Fi blocking sleep thing and just do all your testing in there and the thing is you’re not entirely wrong. I mean in science class.
We all learned that to block electromagnetic waves, it’s as simple as wrapping an object or a space in conductive material grounding it and you got a faraday cage. It’S essentially what this is but watch this. If I stick this tiny wire through this hole, I’m going to go from minus 130 DB to more like minus 70..
How is that even possible? The door’s still closed, I’m still inside a faraday cage. Well, here’s the thing, while every electromagnetically shielded enclosure is a faraday cage, not every Faraday cage is a shielded enclosure and, depending on the purpose of the cage, there are numerous design considerations that must be accounted for. Let’S say the purpose of our cage was to protect an occupant from a lightning strike. Well, a grounded Box made of chain link fence would do the job nicely, but the radio waves that we rely on for cellular signals Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. They would have no trouble at all passing through that and the higher the frequency or the shorter. The wavelength of these signals the more challenging they are to block, and we saw this in action back when we bought those silly radiation blocking Wi-Fi router enclosures on Amazon. Even though they used a relatively fine mesh and they did reduce our signal strength – they still allowed our Wi-Fi to function, meaning that a ton of EMF was still getting through. In that case, that was a good thing, because a Wi-Fi router, with no signal at all, wouldn’t be very useful, but for an EMC chamber any leakage from the noisy environment around it is going to completely invalidate our test results. Thankfully, our unit isn’t cobbled together out of office paper holders, but rather was installed personally by the owner of Raymond EMC, whose encyclopedic knowledge of these things has been incredible. Helping us learn why sorry prepper YouTube building a proper shielded test chamber is a lot more complicated than this or this or this or this segue to our sponsor Raymond EMC. I actually didn’t know at the time that I was filming it that they sponsored this video by giving us the whole RF chamber, and they didn’t mention that when I was talking to them whatever it doesn’t matter, the point is, they did so make extra sure to Go and check them out after this video, if you need a shielded enclosure and a collect chamber or a shielded tent. The point of my wire in the hole demo was to show you guys that when you want to eliminate back round electromagnetic interference, the devil’s in the details, I mean sure any piece of metal that stands in its way can be a barrier for an electromagnetic wave. That’S why we always recommend placing your wireless router away from metal objects, because the wave strikes them a current is induced and the wave ends up more canceled than Kanye West. The tricky part is that, if you want to get all of them, the electrical charge of the entire enclosure needs to be homogeneous AKA there can be no holes or cracks.
That means that this tinfoil hat then is only marginally more useful for blocking electromagnetic waves than this regular one from lttstore.com, and only one of its problems is that it’s not grounded so then shielded enclosure, Step, One is connecting it to ground. But even that is easier said than done for starters. I was two weeks ago old when I found out that our floor in here simply isn’t flat enough shocking, so we needed to pour a thin, concrete slab on top of that is a six millimeter poly Vapor Barrier, and then we get into the the real news. Starting with a 1 8 inch Masonite board that acts as an electrical insulator between the enclosure itself and the floor, then from the enclosure.
We connect the single point ground stud directly to the ground of our electrical panel, which wait a minute. Why do we care about insulating the chamber if we’re just going to ground it anyway? Ah, if we let the enclosure touch the concrete directly, we could end up with multiple paths to ground that could cause Eddy currents and turn the entire enclosure into an antenna which obviously not ideal from there. The enclosure is basically a box made of wood panels with steel sheet on either side, but joining them together is more complicated than it looks. Every single one of these screws needs to be torqued exactly to spec, and if it isn’t, the minute gaps between threads can be a path for electromagnetic waves to get through, and this is not just theoretical paranoia on ours. There was a single screw that wasn’t tightened exactly the same as the others, and the enclosure failed. The 18 gigahertz test. Fortunately, these guys are pros and they were able to quickly track down the Rogue screw and tighten it so with all the panels tightened together. We now have a properly constructed steel box, but this is where things get really complicated. How do you put a door in something like this? I am so glad you asked back to our point from earlier. If all we were trying to do was make a faraday cage, we could just run a single wire from this door to the enclosure and we’re good.
But if we want the whole thing to be homogeneously bonded, we need to get a little fancier. What you’re? Looking at right here is a brass knife edge that goes into a brilliant copper contact frame. This ensures that the entire door panel acts like any other panel of the Box, rather than allowing excess charge to build up on one side of it compared to the other and check this out outside handle made of metal, nice and strong inside handle made of fiberglass. Because if it was metal, it could potentially become a reflector and screw with our test results, at least in theory.
How exactly do we know that it works? Well first, we need to make sure we’re properly hydrated by taking a drink from this fantastic insulated water bottle. Lttstore.Com then we need to mosey over to this fancy Spectrum analyzer and Signal generator that costs I’m sorry a hundred thousand dollars what’s really wild. Is it the guys from Raymond DMC were actually saying that these kinds of tools have become much less expensive in recent years. Yikes, I’m really glad I don’t need to buy one of these.
I can just use theirs while they’re here. So what we’re looking at right now is the signal generator is creating a one gigahertz signal, I’m pointing this antenna at it and it clearly shows up on our Spectrum analyzer now, if Alex closes the door you’ll be able to see the boom. That Peak completely goes away. That means the system works.
Now we were asking the Raymond DMC guys if they had any crazier demos than this and they were like well, here’s the thing imagine that the chamber is like brakes on a car this right here. That’S your speeding, car and now the car stopped like really really well, oh, okay, fair enough good demo, then so now, we’ve got a sealed steel enclosure that blocks electromagnetic waves and we can get in and out of it cool. The next problem is that we need to put some holes in it for things like data power and making sure that the occupants can breathe. Now on the surface, the data part is relatively straightforward. We obviously can’t use copper wires, so we’ll be running. Fiber optic, cable, easy, what’s not easy, is that we need to put it through a very specifically designed hole called the waveguide now clearly, this hole is going to let some electromagnetic radiation through like we can see light through it, for example, but by making the length Exactly four times longer than the diameter of the hole, we can stop any frequencies that have a wavelength, a quarter of the diameter of the hole which is good right, yeah right because they will reflect and bounce in the waveguide and cancel themselves out not impressed. Yet now that you’ve got all the background, let’s do the demo from the beginning. Again, you can see here the chamber is working as intended.
Nothing is showing up on the Spectrum analyzer. I stick my copper wire through here and boom whole day ruined. But if I take that out – and I put this plastic zip tie through here – no problem at all – I hope yes, so Fiber Optic Cables properly engineered hole.
We got this with data taken care of now it’s time to talk about power, and I got ta confess I was not sure how we were going to get AC power running in here without bugging up all of our test results. So, let’s take a closer look, noting very importantly that this is temporary. These are just hacked up extension cables and our electrician is going to come and run conduit from our panel back there over to this box where the magic happens. This is basically a power filter on the electrical connection that goes into our chamber. It uses a capacitor and an inductor that are expect to allow low frequencies to pass through, like the 60 hertz AC from the wall, but as the frequency increases, the capacitor and the inductor are going to clamp down and remove them, making sure that only the bits We want get through. Finally, we need to get some fresh air in here, since, sadly, the lab isn’t run by robots yet and the way these work is actually pretty similar to the wave guide that we showed you guys for the fiber, except instead of a small handful of holes. It’S many many holes, don’t worry! I got my prompter right here so up here, you’re looking at a matrix of hexagons that are stacked on top of each other.
That will prevent anything below 32 gigahertz from getting through. This will be great for most of what we’ll be testing to start, but seriously you guys have given us the upsell already we’re gon na need to upgrade some of these components. If we want to measure millimeter 5G in the future, assuming that anyone ever actually starts caring about cellular signals that can be blocked by a piece of paper to recap, then we’ve got a steel box that doesn’t let radio waves in or out that’s good, but the Problem is that if we just have normal steel walls inside the signals will be bouncing around creating a bunch of modes and nodes or constructive and deconstructive interference with those bouncing around. There would be no way to know if we were measuring the device itself or Its Reflection off the ceiling or the wall or the floor, or some combination of the three to stop our test from interfering with our test. Then the walls are lined with these. These are carbon impregnated, polyethylene panels from TDK that were imported all the way from Japan.
How these work is that carbon is a conductor but kind of a bad one. So when the electromagnetic waves hit the carbon, it creates an impedance and the energy gets turned into heat. Now. This does mean that we can’t put any super high power radio antennas in there.
The panels would either melt or light on fire, or maybe both, but since there are no plans to run a local radio station out of our RF chamber, I think we should be okay. All this effort will create a quiet Zone in the middle of the room, where we’ll be able to accurately test all kinds of things once our gear arrives, specifically we’re going to start with phones using a fire cell 4G 5G lab kit that simulates a mobile network For all you, big nerds out there, by the way the chamber was designed to comply with IEEE 299, just like the Segway complies with the association for Segway standardization, 4.20 Segway Raymond DMC. Once again again huge thanks guys for getting us the RF chamber and look. It has a four now so if you need a shielded enclosure, EMC chamber and a cook chamber or any of the parts that go into them, they’re super good at answering your questions.
They even have mobile enclosures. If you need RF shielding when you’re on the go. So check them out down below if you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you’ll enjoy the one on our first attempts to buy an RF chamber that is still garbage in our warehouse. Thank you.
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