ELF Technology Used to Manipulate Citizens, page 1

Originally posted by whitewave
Curiosity kicking in again....If ELF is so grossly inefficient, why would the Navy use it in the first place?

This is an excellent question, and you get a virtual gold paper star on your lapel (poink!).

The short answer is, it's the only way to get a radio signal to reach under a lot of seawater. Seawater is conductive, it eats up the radio signal, and the degree to which this happens is directly proportional to the frequency you use.

The long answer goes like this. All materials have properties that affect the way that radio signals propagate through them. Back in 1864, an exceptionally brilliant man named James Maxwell produced a set of 20 equations in 20 variables that describe how electromagnetic signals propagate, and how the materials they're propagating in affect them. It was an Einsteinian moment. They were so profound and so complex, that only a few people understood them or could work with them.

Another guy named Oliver Heaviside came along and chopped it down into four succinct equations that all comm theory EEs have used since. Whether Oliver tossed out babies in that bathwater is a matter of long years of conjecture, but at any rate, that's the model we all use.

Among other things, these equations can be used to calculate the rate of signal loss due to a thickness of a material of specified qualities. In this case, you need the permeability, the permittivity, and the conductivity figures. Permeability and permittivity are a measure of how hard it is for a signal to push its magnetic and electric vector components into the material, and the conductivity tells you how much of the signal becomes converted to heat. That's sort of a simplification but I'm going to leave out the field theory as much as possible.

As I said before, the higher the frequency, the faster the signal is lost in any medium except vacuum. So, let's take the commonly used values for seawater.

If I had an AM radio station on the shore trying to send a signal to a submerged sub, and the station was at 1MHz, about the middle of the AM band, the seawater would eat up the signal at the rate of 34.5dB per meter. Now, 3 dB is a loss of half the signal. So 34.5 dB is like losing half, then half of that, then half of that about 11 times in a row. Per meter of seawater.

You can visualize how fast this is going to eat up the signal, and in fact, you just can't live with that.

As a side note, a 1GHz signal would lose half its strength in 3mm of seawater.

But for the ELF rig at 100Hz, you only lose 0.345dB/m, that's still bad but it's a lot better than 34.5dB. It leaves you a handful of nanovolts of signal at the depths they lurk in, which is tough but still practical to pull out of the noise.

Also, with the alleged HAARP effect on the stratosphere, is it possible that the entire atmosphere could be made into a conductor for ELF, negating the need for specialized antennaes?

Well, it's not alleged. This is one of the 'real' things they do. They put the details on the HAARP website, which surprised me seeing that we weren't released from NDA on it. But the website's page is correct on this function, so if you go there you can read about it in more detail than I'll give here.

Now, this is also a very good question, so you get another gold star (poink!).

I imagine that most of the radio signal conductors you've seen are probably something like the coax used by the cable company. But you can also run radio in pipes like water. We call those waveguides. A waveguide is usually shaped and sized to fit the radio signal it's carrying, so you couldn't use one the size of your finger for ELF.

All it takes to make a waveguide is an enclosed conductive surface. One way to make one is to put a conductive sphere inside a conductive sphere, with air in between them. Like the Earth and the ionosphere. Both fill the bill nicely, and in fact the two form a waveguide that works very nicely for lots of different radio signals. As I said, the size and shape of the waveguide determines the most efficient frequency that the waveguide operates at. In the case of the Earth, there are resonances at 6.5Hz, 18Hz and so on. This is called the "Schumann resonance". I suspect you've heard that term bandied about by the less-informed.

Here's a neat site with some graphics that will help you see it.

In fact, all the Schumann resonance is, is the resonant frequency of the Earth-ionosphere waveguide. Period. Since the ionosphere moves around a lot from night to day, and from day to day, due to the Sun and other incoming EM, the Schumann resonance drifts around, and is not an 'exact' resonance like you'd get if the Earth and ionosphere were nice rigid metal spheres, there's actually a series of peaks. The Schumann numbers are used by a number of different sciences and there are actually Schumann measuring sites on the net so you can get today's numbers.

I imagine you have heard a lot of hooey about it being the "life force" or "life beat of Gaia" or some such clap trap. That's all crap. It's no more spiritual than blowing across the neck of a Coke bottle and it's the same effect in general. A tuned cavity resonating at a frequency. The end.

Anyways, ELF uses this ionosphere-Earth waveguide to propagate in, like your cable signal uses coax. So, yes, the waveguide is a conductor of it, but it's not the generator of it, nor the antenna. The old way to do the antenna was to use 75 mile long cables (it looks like power wires if you don't know what it is) that run over bedrock that has some desired qualities (like permittivity, permeability and conductivity). Once the wave comes off the antenna, it propagates in your waveguide, but you can't use the waveguide itself to launch the wave. HAARP could use another way to generate the wave, but again, once launched it propagates in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide.

Technically speaking, the far field of the old Naval system formed a horizontal magnetic field and a vertical electrical field, and the propagation in the waveguide was by means of a quasi-TEM mode. A leakage field also occurs, directed into the surface of the Earth, and subsurface communications use this leakage field. The leakage field is a plane TEM wave that follows a propagation law similar to that of the voltage in a transmission line, and that's the law you use to calculate loss per meter.

On the HAARP website they'll tell you how they do that.