This is how you take back your streets

[Ninurta]

Some buildings do act as Faraday cages, particularly commercial structures with steel studs, but as you observe here, if they block radio, they should block cell signals, too, so the excuse sounds a bit off to me.

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I don't know how that works.

I know that my phone receives calls and allows me to make calls, off and on.

My office is right next door to a hospital, so at first I thought it might have something to do with some of the equipment being intermittently used in the hospital, because my office sits between the imaging department and the ER. But my phone works just fine when if I go outside.

Something is causing the interference, I just don't know what it is. It is not just my phone. It is the same way with the anyone's phone. I am not sure how badly it affects the police communication devices. I can't understand a word that comes across those things, inside or outside.

A Faraday Cage is a metal or metal mesh construction that blocks radio signals getting to anything inside it. Some construction uses steel i-beams for support, and even sheet metal studs for interior walls. That metal can act as a Faraday Cage to block radio signals. It's my understanding that it can be "tuned" to block certain frequencies and not others by adjusting the mesh spacing - certain wavelengths can be blocked by making the spacing shorter than the length of the radio wave, and that wave length is affected by the frequency being transmitted or received.

Proximity to a window may allow reception at some times, and getting away from it may block reception because the signals then have to travel through the interior walls that may have sheet metal studs blocking it.

Around here, a lot of houses have sheet metal roofs, including mine. That blocks satellite signals, so GPS will not work inside my house. Because of that, when I set up my "network extender" to get a cell signal inside the house, I had to run the wire for the GPS antenna it has to have through a window, across the balcony, and attach the GPS antenna to the roof of the house above the balcony so that it could "see" the sky where the satellites are. The upside to that is that my sheet metal roof acts like a big reflector, and reflects more signal to the antenna, making it stronger.

Some radio signals are line-of-sight, like satellite signals, FM radio, and microwaves (like cell signals), and others bounce around more and are easier to pick up, like AM radio.

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