At first I misread the title as “Faraday Suburbs” which reminds me of an anecdote that some might find interesting:
Once upon a time I was working with wireless communications with trains, and part of the idea was to have as much signal strength and bandwidth available on the stations to allow for firmware and other large data transfers to happen while at thebstation (outside of the stations we prioritized passenger internet service with what little bandwidth we had available).
This worked fairly well, except on one station - the biggest one. We had invested heavily in hardware and antennae placed on this building that towered above the station, so that a few directional antennae covered the entire station with a huge conical beam. But still the comms were shoddy at best. We did everything we could to teoubleshoot, measuring antenna and cable attenuation.
One day I rented a spectrum analyzer and noticed that the signal on the platforms was A LOT weaker than merely five meters higher up on this walkways that crossed all of the tracks. And this is where those of us who were network engineers came up short. We were discussing the issue by the coffee maker one day, and this passing train engineer overheard us. “Oh, I could’ve told you that would be a problem.”
He informed us that years earlier they had the same issue back at the depot, and the fix was to move the antennae further down to be more level with the trains. Well, what train people realized pretty quickly, as opposed to us computer-geeks, was that the overhead electrical cables interfere with WiFi signals. At 16000 Volts and 16.66Hz you create a fairly hefty magnetic field around the overhead wire. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as the signal can wrap around this. But put enough of these wires in parallell, and tou’re in effect creating a faraday blanket.
When we moved our antennae further down to instead beam the signal horizontally underneath the overhead wires, the signal strength was so high that we had to on purpose attenuate the signal, as it was suddenly too strong.
Also, cool photo. May I ask where?
That’s a really interesting, both as a science/engineering story and also an example of how organisations never seem to share important information within unless you happen to be in the right place/right time for someone to overhear eyeroll
As to your question, all I know is ‘London’ I don’t know which station, and I did have a quick search to see, but no joy. If you like London public transport images she does some good ones of the Tube and some other (unnamed) stations
