Just occurred to me that the humble microwave should be a fairly effective Faraday cage, certainly for the microwave spectrum, anyone know how good it is for the relevant communication frequencies?

  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Many microwaves suck as faraday cages, because they are made to be an effective cage only for a very specific frequency (the one the microwave runs at). Unfortunately, mobile radio frequencies are all over the place, for historic, technical, competition etc. reasons. So it is not a good Faraday cage, unless you want to only block out a specific radio (usually, 2.4 GHz Wifi and Bluetooth should be blocked).

    You can build a good, vhf to multi-gigahertz frequencies cage by using a metal box and covering all the gaps, cracks etc. in tinfoil or copper tape. Bonus points for grounding. I made a decent one (for some unrelated radio experiments) out of a metal box and a tin foil seal, -60 dB at 2.4 GHz and no reason why it wouldn’t work at other frequencies.