Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers can effectively “see” and recognize individuals — even if they are not carrying a device and even if their phone is turned off.
Wouldn’t a microwave causing significant interference also be a sign of a very faulty, potentially unsafe microwave? If it’s bathing your environment with microwaves, you’re cooking to some degree. I know a 2.4 GHz router is using microwaves too, but restricted to much lower power. I’d be very suspicious of an oven that’s leaking enough to interfere with my signals since you don’t know how strong the leaking microwaves are and they may in fact be harmful. I imagine someone standing in front of their microwave watching it operate, cooking their eyeballs as they wait.
to be fair, maybe. To pass FCC/CE regulation regarding EMC, it has to adhere to strict limits at 2.4 GHz (but I could also imagine for microwave ovens specifically that the allowed emissions are higher than for other devices, because 2.4 GHz is just the band it operates in. But idk, I didnt read the standard for those). But it does not mean that it may not radiate anything in that band.
Anyways, my observation was that it did interfere and the microwave was definitely closed. But also it was not 10m distance to the microwave, more like 2m, so relatively close. WiFi receivers are quite sensitive to be able to work with low received powers. So just a little emission is sufficient to interfere. You are probably not disturbing the communication itself, because OFDM is quite robust, but it certainly destroyed my use case (which operated on the whole CSI).
And there is definitely some stuff leaking, e.g. through radiated emissions on the wiring (the power line). But it is certainly not cooking anything. That’s also what the regulation makes sure of.