Today I was reading about a device the military has access to called ADS that is used as a crowd control measure. It fires a concentrated beam of electromagnetic waves at targets, stimulating the sensation of being on fire.
Is it possible to defeat this new tool of worker oppression and if so how? Can protesters affordably defeat this measure on a mass scale?
It’s worth mentioning that talk of “simulating” the sensation of being burned is inaccurate and marketing/PR. It works by remotely heating the skin. It causes the sensation of burning by raising your skin temperature to the range where your skin will begin to burn. There is no simulation. It warms the skin enough to cause first degree burns and some second degree burns have been observed in testing.
The principle is identical to a microwave except it uses 95 gigahertz. Any effective mechanism to dampen electromagnetic radiation would potentially be effective. It has been speculated that the ADS has not been deployed in part because if weather conditions are bad (snow/rain) the signal strength will fall through the floor. IE it’s apparently not a very robust weapon and was very much designed only to work in ideal conditions on people who’ve not taken any countermeasures against it.
https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/the-active-denial-system-test-what-is-it-what-does-it-do.html
It’s a very high freq microwave beam. It can easily be defeated by anything that stops microwaves. So a standard antifa riot shield, layered with foil.
As soon as they start deploying these, the foil will appear. Too easy to deal with.
The real problem is gonna be the sound based version. LRADS or whatever. Sound is tricky.
Any ideas on affordable, LRADS countermeasures available to the masses?
I don’t know for sure (I’m not an engineer) but I have a strong suspicion that those emergency Mylar blankets would work to reflect(?) most of the EM radiation.
The blankets are cheap, portable, readily accessible, and there’s very little to lose by trying it out. Just make sure that when you do raise it that you fold the blanket in around your hands as if you were using a fire blanket (plenty of instructional diagrams online for that.)
It would probably be worth having multiple so that you could deploy your own and then move to cover a comrade on the ground and drop a blanket on them so they could cover themselves and so on.
I wonder how much juice the device uses… if we are fortunate it won’t be able to sustain long bursts and/or it will chew through too much battery for it to be used constantly for more than a short period.
No. Won’t work. I’t microwave, not light. Metal foil, or in a pinch, a soaking wet blanket.
I’m trying to figure out how a frequency in the range of IR wouldn’t be reflected by Mylar; Mylar is literally foil bonded to a plastic layer designed to reflect IR radiation back to a person who is wrapped in it.
Why do you think that it won’t work?
Because i am an engineer. And you just compared water to petrol, because they are both liquids.
IR is light. Radio waves are not. They may both be photons, but they are quite different. Like ice and liquid water. Both H2), both different.,
Mylar does not reflect radio. Metals do. So unless your mylar ALSO includes metal, it won’t work. Just because light and radiowaves both have a frequency, does not make them the same.
It’s NOT IR. All your comments are wrong.
Ultra high freq radio has some very bizarre properties, like making things of a certain size catch fire, but not other things. But it’s still basically radio. OR microwave if you like.
There are only 2 ways it can cause pain: Either by actually doing things to you, like cooking you just a bit. Which would mean that if they left it on too long, it would do some damage.
OR, it’s artificially stimulating your nerves, due to nerve induction. Yes, it’s a real thing, used in some forms of therapy. Yes, you could make the bene gesserit pain box. This would mean that toughing it out without getting hurt, is possible.
Also, you have LRADS [sound based] mixed up with ADS [Microwave].
ADS should be blockable by anything that stops microwaves. Sheet metal for example. Make a light shield out of sheet metal. Also, microwaves interact with water molecules. That’s how they cook stuff. This should be similar. a wet blanket should also stop it. Wrap yourself in several layers of metal foil.
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A Faraday cage would presumably be effective, but the thing that bothers me is that there is no specific description of the mechanics of this weapon. All we can do is infer the specifics from a description of the damage it inflicts; that the radiation only “penetrates 1/64th of an inch into the skin”. I’m not a biophysicist or a radiologist, so I couldn’t begin to guess what kind of wavelength we’re dealing with, though someone does cite “radio waves” so assuming they aren’t talking in generalities we can assume it’s a very long wavelength.
What kind of makeshift, wearable Faraday cage could be constructed by a mass of people from readily available materials? It seems to me that so far the only really worthwhile strategy is disabling the weapon from outside it’s effective range, something like 3 football fields? That’d require an anti-materiel rifle at least.
“The ADS works by firing a high-powered (100 kW output power) beam of 95 GHz waves at a target, which corresponds to a wavelength of 3.2 mm”
Well, there you go - it’s effectively a very intense infrared beam which is close to the visible spectrum.
Sounds like you can just space blanket it up then.
We both had the same idea and posted about it at the same time ;)
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The sonic weapon is more likely than the heat ray. Heat ray will likely cause horrific burns which will lead to bad publicity
however it appears they are satisfied with the effectiveness of their existing weapons - tear gas, rubber bullets etc, and won’t be using these new weapons
Austin pd set up a sonic weapon early in the protests but took it down without (to my knowledge) ever using it
