Actually, I’ve seen such a device as Sunspace described, in fact almost word for word the same, I don’t remember the dimensions of the space enclosed, 1 meter? 1.5 meters square? It was a while ago. That was the “no-go cubicle” for out janitorial company. We weren’t to touch it.
Re: chainlink Faraday cages… roughly speaking, the cage shields against electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths greater than the width of the holes in the cage.
So the screened cage I worked in, with openings a couple of millimetres wide, would block radio waves with a wavelength greater than a couple of millimetres (a frequency less than about 150 GHz). This is one reason why visible light could get though the cage; its wavelength is much less, between 380 nm for violet, and 750 nm for red (frequencies of roughly 680 THz to 480 THz).
Your chainlink Faraday cage would have openings say 3 cm wide, which would block radio waves of less than about 10 GHz. So depending on the frequencies the Evil Conspiracist Satellites are using, a chainlink faraday cage might actually work.
I think that, for a chainlink Faraday cage to work, even for long-wavelength waves, you’d need good electrical contact between the the wires. Without that, you’d just have a (probably not very efficient) polarizer, not a barrier.
While Faraday cages often are grounded, they do not need to be grounded.
Meh, kinda. They do work as a Faraday cage but they are often a bit leaky. If you put a cell phone inside one (DO NOT TURN THE MICROWAVE ON OR YOU WILL DESTROY THE PHONE!!!) and call the phone it will usually ring, which proves that while a microwave will greatly diminish cell phone radio frequencies, enough RF leaks through that the phone can still work. Some of the bigger commercial microwave ovens make decent Faraday cages but most el-cheapo home microwaves don’t seal well enough.
A bit OT, but I am amazed by the number of people (even EEs who should know better) that believe something must be “grounded” in order to work. Almost nothing needs to be grounded in order to work. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is a Marconi antenna that uses the earth as a ground plane. Of course, we do connect things to earth ground all the time. But that’s for electrical safety reasons, not in order to make a device “work.”
Was just working with an engineer who had a RF noise problem on a circuit. He said, “The problem will probably go away if we connect the circuit’s ground plane to earth ground.” I knew it wouldn’t work, but told him to try it anyway. Didn’t work. He didn’t realize or understand that, even if a connection to earth ground would fix the problem, a wire between the ground plane and the earth would have so much inductance that it would be an open circuit at the noise frequency.
I am not an RF expert, but I think the reason is due to the skin effect: I believe the effectiveness of a Faraday cage diminishes at wavelengths that are much longer than the thickness of the metal enclosure. “Skin depth” and all that stuff.
Well, yes. OTOH, a building still “works” without lightning rods, and the rods are simply there for protection. I addressed this in my earlier comment.
At the same job, they bought some commercial microwave ovens and ripped the guts out of them to simply use the enclosures as test chambers. I never found out what happened to the guts; I was pondering making a microwave pistol out of the magnetron, if I could work out the impedance matching.