They sell a small box that hooks up to your car battery, or your the mains in the breaker panel for your house. There's a few feet of cabling to a small box which they claim can clamp the energy from the EMP. If you try to search youtube for this product you can only find positive reviews from the "prepper" community, and any tear-downs seem to have been removed. The company claims to be active with the military as well.
Their testing consists of legitimate testing for EMP, however they only test the unit itself -- not hooked up to anything. I don't see any evidence that this product actually works when hooked up to a car or house. Am I going crazy here, is this a huge scam or some legitimate technology?
[1] https://www.empshield.com/ [2] http://www.empshield.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/EMP_Shie... [3] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/news/emp-shield-scam/
But that wouldn't work to protect electronics from magnetic pulses that would induce current within an electronic device's circuits. That needs grounded shielding physically around the circuit, like a Faraday cage.
I don't really get why there is a market for this in the first place. A cheap and unpatentable solution for EMP shielding already exists: Faraday cages.
I need to introduce these people to my special Yeti defense device. In millions of hours of testing there have been zero Teti attacks! It works perfectly!
Wassis?
Ignorance and salespeople.
Most panelboard manufacturers make a device that can plug in to your main electrical panel just like a breaker and is probably much more effective due to being directly attached to the bus.
(Not necessarily against EMPs. But it should do pretty well against a conducted surge due to nearby lightning or a utility switching transient. It won’t do very well if used in a non-main-panel, because they generally lack separate neutral and ground connections — a good surge protector anywhere other than a “service entrance” will separately protect line-line, line-neutral (2x), line-ground (2x), and neutral-ground, for a total of six individual transient voltage suppression devices.)
And regardless of the protection type, star power/ground and absolutely no wires going from any of the protected devices to other unprotected devices.
Call me a pawn of big business, but I'd much rather pay $200 or less for a whole house surge protector made by a respected electrical equipment manufacturer than almost $400 for one made by a company that ladles grandiose claims about nuclear weapons over their product.
I'm at a loss how they managed to convince anyone into thinking they were going to employ 1000 people, or do anything related to chip manufacturing.
Ever see the school experiments where a magnet is waved by a coil of wire hooked to a volt meter which registers voltage and therefor current flow? That is how generators work - spin a big magnet in a big coil of wire and that generates lots of electricity. Moving a wire through a magnetic field induces current flow if there is a complete circuit.
Now picture your smart phone, laptop, PC, console, car, etc, anything with wires or conductors - and now wave a really really really BIG magnet next to it. That can induce currents so large that the wiring can melt, semiconductors vaporized or melted, chip bonding wires vaporized, pcb traces vaporized, etc. Basically total destruction via a massive current/voltage spike.
I read about an EMP test Russia conducted on a length of telephone wire which was placed next to a nuclear test site hooked to some instrumentation. I do not remember the exact numbers offhand but the EMP induced over 3000 amps on those little telephone wires for a few microseconds before they vaporized.
Issues with this:
Adding a long wire to your protection device isn’t going to do much.
Signals, not power, are the biggest concern in cars.
You really need protection at the ingress of each device, and shielding of individual enclosures, to be effective.
The key quote, buried way down in the article: EMP Shield will leverage state support to apply for CHIPS Act funding to see its plans to fruition.
That’s right, this is just wishful thinking and hype. Zero dollars in government funding have been approved.
I wonder if you could use an MOV or similar surge suppressor in parallel with a lightning gap to achieve useful protection?
As others have said, their device is not full EMP protection. At best, it will protect your electronics from a surge on the grid but not locally present EM fields.
Someone should call ElectroBoom and have him do a teardown.
"Was signed." Nice use of the passive voice, there.
The tech sounds a bit dodgy, though. Could well end up in Wisconsin/Foxconn territory.
Let's hope they're legit. It's good to diversify local manufacturing and rural Kansas could use the jobs.
https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/056178b4-e8b5-4...
