 For today's episode of Kick Farted, we'll be investigating the claims made by Shield Headwear, a company that specializes in fashionable RF shielding apparel to keep your head safe from the harmful radiation that is all around us in this digital age. They say with their Shield Headwear, signals are hundreds of times lower inside, with the shielding effect maxing out at 60 decibels, which would mean 99.999% of the incident radiation is blocked. Sounds impressive, right? I mean, I guess so, but since I'm not an engineer or a biologist or... Why does anyone listen to me? Anyway, the point is, I'm not gonna weigh in on whether RF radiation is harmless or the next coming of Satan himself or somewhere in between. That's beyond the scope of this video. What I am going to do is travel to Vancouver Island to investigate these claims with Katarina Gustavs, an EMF consultant with a special interest in RF radiation, who notably is one of the certified consultants listed on Shield Headwear's own website. Though I doubt after this video she'll be there much longer. Intel's Skull Canyon NUC features a sixth generation Core i7 quad-core processor and Thunderbolt 3. Learn more at the link in the video description. So we're not in a lab here, strictly speaking, but we believe that we've created a test environment that's as good or better than the one used by Shield Headwear. So to give you some idea of how much control we have over our environment, with this ultra broadband antenna, our background RF level is around 3.5 microwatts per square meter, thanks to our location halfway up Mount Matheson. So there's hardly even cell phone service here, compared to on the top of the mountain where the radar pulses can hit 10,000 microwatts per square meter or more. This is wilderness, folks. Moving on to our gear, the first thing we need is our trusty HF59B RF meter from GHz Solutions. This is the same one used in the testing done by Shield Headwear, but it should be noted that our setup for it is a little different. We're using the more accurate and better shielded log periodic antenna that is included with the HF59B. It's actually very unclear to us why Shield Headwear opted for the one that normally ships with GHz Solutions lower-end model, since mixing and matching can deliver unreliable readings. And while Shield is using the 2.4 GHz mode to filter out anything but 2.4 gig Wi-Fi signals, we're using a high-pass filter to cut off anything below 800 MHz, though since there is so little background RF here, this is effectively the same thing. So for our first trick, we need a baseline reading on a bog-standard home router. I grabbed a D-Link DIR-655. At a distance of 1.5 meters, we're looking at peaks of around 2.2 milliwatts per square meter, with no connected clients. It should be noted that due to its nature, a Wi-Fi signal will always be kind of jumpy like this, rather than giving us a solid reading. Since a hat can be worn a number of different ways, for the sake of thoroughness, we decided to try several different ways for our router to wear the tuque or beanie, beginning with kind of loosely to represent what it might be like if it didn't entirely cover the source of the RF radiation. And in this scenario, we observed a 10x decrease. Not too shabby, but not exactly hundreds of times better either. Our second hat position has most of the antennas covered, and we see another significant improvement in the signal blocking effectiveness of the hat, leading us to our third measurement where we carefully cover the entire antenna array, and we are able to reproduce the results demonstrated in Shield Headwear's video. But there's a problem with this. While the general rules for this meter are to use as coarse a scale as you have to, but as fine a scale as possible, and for comparative measurements, you should stay within the same scale, if we use only the coarse measurement like they did, we would think that we've gotten all the way down to 2 microwatts per square meter, just because that's what it displays in the coarse reading mode. We actually have to switch to the fine mode to get a more accurate reading. Oops, 100 microwatts per square meter. So then what would it take to get to the 2 microwatt reading from Shield Headwear's video? We tried wrapping a second beanie on the router, being careful to eliminate any gaps in the coverage in an attempt to simulate the effect of a Faraday cage. And it turns out that yes, while this method of wearing the product isn't particularly fashionable or comfortable, the silver fabric material being used is capable of the results they demonstrated. But radiation shielding products, I mean, these are things that are commercially available and have actually engineering that go into them, are as much about the design as they are about the materials choice. I mean, titanium is a strong material, but it wouldn't be a very good idea to wear a solid titanium motorcycle helmet for what I'd like to think are fairly obvious reasons. So back then to Shield Headwear, we've recreated their test and demonstrated that their beanie is not as effective at blocking RF radiation as they think it is when used in the manner demonstrated in their video. But frankly, that isn't even the main issue here. Let's pick through some of the other problems. By their own admission, the material reflects signals. So when short of sticking your head into a microwave oven, which isn't recommended, by the way, the biggest source of the signals your headwear is supposed to be blocking is the phone that you've got your face buried into. Why did they put a concave reflector in the case of the baseball cap right above your face? And why are they ignoring the findings of these MIT students who determined that wearing a tin foil hat actually affects the quality of the signal when transmitted to the cranium from receivers outside? I mean, as they do point out on their website, the signals won't shoot around inside your skull like lightsabers, but will be mostly absorbed by the various layers of tissue in your head. But like, isn't that the point of this stuff? That we don't want that? And that's why they're ignoring the findings of the signals. They're ignoring the findings of the signals that are in your head, but like, isn't that the point of this stuff? That we don't want that? And somehow, their own mention of the inconvenient truth that a true signal blocking device would cover the head from top to bottom, that doesn't stop them from claiming that their hat is a personal bodyguard against radiation, and that it doesn't need to be grounded on the surface of the body, and that it's a human bodyguard against radiation. And then, is it, you guys? I mean, on top of that, the RF meter that they and we are using is not for measuring in the so-called near field zone anyway, like inside of a hat with a smartphone next to it, the way people use phones, making everything that we're testing completely meaningless anyhow. And finally, they specifically make a point we could have pointed out the misspelling of signal proof on their website as an indication they aren't strong fact checkers, but for good measure, we tested that too, and whipped up a frugal and IMO quite stylish aluminum foil hat, tested it, and hot damn, it works even better. So, there you have it. I'm still not qualified to say whether Wi-Fi signals are harmful or not. I will leave that to the scientists. But what I can say with confidence is that if you want to protect yourself from them, my homemade solution is just as good as the 30 to 40 euro one that you can buy on shieldheadwear.com. Though you should know that both of these types of shielding hats may not work as intended and may even increase your RF exposure to your head. Derp. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Maybe don't buy this stuff. That's okay. You could just go to the link and buy something else. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner. If you haven't already seen our last episode of Kick Farted on the Neptune Pine, a wrist-mounted phone that's as dumb as it sounds.