I thought a whole load of things ran in the 2.4GHz band these days: garage door openers, wireless doorbells, etc.

At my previous place of work we had to get rid of a microwave as it would kill the wireless as soon as it was switched on.

Google Spectrumview.

"system could be established using their technology for around £2.11m annually, plus about the same in start-up costs"

"and tipped them £300,000 to pay for it."

I'm puzzled. If they managed to get all this info for £300K how the hell does the cost get to £2.1m +?

Just North of Cambridge you'll find DB Technology where all the local high-tech startups take their new gadgets for EMC testing. If you drive past there on the wrong day you could find all sorts of bizarre emissions.

Oh, and Millom isn't a village. It's a dump. I mean, it's a town.

This is almost certainly a '1.2GHz' video sender, probably bought off ebay. They're quite common, and are nowhere near 1.2GHz in most cases. They can also be remarkably high power. Not legal for unlicensed use, even if they WERE on 1.2GHz. They're normally simple but robust transistor oscillators, not PLL based, and are usually just above 1GHz. The manufacturers often go to significant trouble to disguise how simple the things are, to the extent of soldering down a number of random dummy chips that aren't even connected to anything to make it look more complicated than it really is.

I had a very small (about the size of a sugarcube) transmitter of this type some years ago. It was a very simple, two-transistor, video only unit, but produced nearly 200mW of RF. It was tuned to 1.064GHz, very close to this 1.075GHz one. Surprisingly, for such a simple and cheap thing it produced very good video quality. However, when I measured it's output, I decided that transmitting on a military navigation beacon frequency wasn't a very good idea...

Would love to see the map for my house.

Aside from the dozen or so wireless transmitters I personally have, the place is swamped by at least a dozen neighbouring wifi signals, plus all their other wireless gadgets, the mobile signals passing through the place along with I suspect some transmissions from the nearby electricity substation (which appears to have a data connection judging by the massive sat dish on top). Not to mention the EM emissions from the substation and pylons.

If I haven't already got brain cancer, leukaemia and what-not, I probably will. Time to build a Faraday cage I think. Tinfoil hat might help too.

I presume that the data was weighted according to how often the sensors were in that location, but do the blank spots in the highlands and islands indicate lack of use, or lack of readings? Some of those areas have very few roads, but consequently little likelihood of a passing salesman,

Am I missing something here? So there is a lot of evidence of human habitation and effects on the environment in.......areas where lots of humans are living?!

Hmmm, earth shattering stuff!

Actually it doesn't show that hardly anyone in the Highlands is using wireless. If you look at Figure 1, "Track taken by survey vehicles across the UK" in the PDF you'll notice that readings are constant over the routes travelled. None of the islands were visited - that doesn't mean that there's no wireless there, just that they weren't measured.

Don't be misled by the map - if you look at the report you'll see they only mapped along a few roads in the Highlands.

No matter how many sensors it carries, the data collection vehicle is not going to detect anyone transmitting using a sat dish, too directional.

Plus, the incidence of WiFi usage is going to depend on how long people's front gardens are - long garden = no detection of WiFi signal = no WiFi in use?

its about time to start investing in stocks for lead paint !

I thought OFCOM had a remotely controlled monitoring network that was used for spectrum surveillance? It is not as comprehensive as vehicle driving around but would have thought they had got some useful data from that.

Then their is other RF surveillance network that is said to have been installed.

Be funny if the videosender was being used by the police to spy on someone!

An interesting excercise as a pilot, but their coverage is woeful for anything short range like 802.11g. To say that 65,000km of roads covers most of the population is somewhat disengenous. For short range stuff you need to be within a few meters of the source, lets be generous to them and say 10m. What percentage of properties in the UK did their detectors get within 10m of?

I can see about a dozen APs from my house. Even if they did come past on the nearest A road (about 15m from the house) fact that the road sits beyond a 2m high retaining wall a the end of our garden means that they are unlikely to have seen much of the signals emenating from our street. So anybody using their tool to check out 2.4GHz saturation would think there was little or no usage on our street. Useful.

>Would give the tin hat brigade something to worry about and therefore the rest of us to laugh at.

Laugh all you want but it may be no coincidence that as the level of electromagentic radiation increases in highly populated areas so does the level of stupidity among the general population. Historically every empire had it's new thing that eventually led to it's downfall more often than not as a result of turning the people into blithering idiots.

The possible damage to our bodies notwithstanding, it seems like all this power could be gathered and used.

I agree stupidity increases in densely populated areas, but then so do a lot of things, like levels of malnutrition, child neglect, levels of people with less education. All are related, but none are related to the amount of wifi that has popped up in the last 5 years.

Can you give me some examples of Empires that have been brought down by a technology advance? You seem to imply that there are lots of examples but I can't think of any although I'm very interested.

I would certainly class lead piping as a technology advance but I hadn't heard the theory that it caused the decline of the Roman Empire. Very interesting, although I should note that most of my google search results linked to refutations of the theory or downplayings of the importance of the factor.

Any other examples? My macabre side would find a certain grim glee in the idea that humans keep crippling themselves by wanting more stuff

Just one more. "mayan empire deforestation" but you have to assume that they were cutting down the forests for something that was to their advantage and not just to get a better view.