Radio Free Zone
June 23, 2019 5:41 PM   Subscribe

To find real solitude, you have to go out of range. But every year that’s harder to do, as America’s off-the-grid places disappear.

Want to Hunt Aliens? Go to West Virginia's Low-Tech 'Quiet Zone' [Wired]
The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) was established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Docket No. 11745 (November 19, 1958) and by the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee (IRAC) in Document 3867/2 (March 26, 1958) to minimize possible harmful interference to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, WV and the radio receiving facilities for the United States Navy in Sugar Grove, WV. The NRQZ is bounded by NAD-83 meridians of longitude at 78d 29m 59.0s W and 80d 29m 59.2s W and latitudes of 37d 30m 0.4s N and 39d 15m 0.4s N, and encloses a land area of approximately 13,000 square miles near the state border between Virginia and West Virginia.
Green Bank Observatory, National Radio Quiet Zone

To Study the Stars, This Town Went Off the Grid [National Geographic photo tour of the zone]

Inside the U.S.’s ‘National Radio Quiet Zone’ where there’s no WiFi or cellphone service [Washington Post photo tour]

[previously]
posted by Ahmad Khani (21 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
How would I go off the grid? I don't find it hard.

First: No phones that have ...
posted by Splunge at 5:55 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


What a strange definition of solitude. The author goes to a town without wifi and talks to people. If I were seeking solitude I'd go to the middle of nowhere and turn off my phone.I'd still see airplanes and satellites overhead but I would actually be alone.
posted by rdr at 6:01 PM on June 23, 2019 [15 favorites]


Yeah, he's looking for a very particular thing that I'm not even sure I would call "solitude" as such. Solitude, IMO, indicates being alone.

What he seems to be looking for is a disconnection from his normal life, but not necessarily actually being alone.

Nothing against Green Bank, but most people just call that a "vacation" and you can certainly do it in places besides rural WV.

As for the seeming problem of the rest of the country getting more connected, I think it's pretty arrogant to view that as a negative—it's typically not perceived as such by the people who actually live in rural areas and are just now getting 4G cellular service or cable internet for the first time. It's reminiscent of gap year kids complaining about tourists.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:10 PM on June 23, 2019 [18 favorites]


If you, like me, have ever felt totally alone in a building with ten thousand other people in it, in the middle of a city with millions of other people in it, this really comes across as some Walden-Pond-type performative-feelings nonsense.
posted by mhoye at 6:23 PM on June 23, 2019 [22 favorites]


Different people have different boundaries and desires. I feel like there's a distinction to be made between anonymity and isolation. Personally, I think I'd rather be "alone" in a big city than dozens of miles from any human contact, but like I said, different people have different needs. I don't think you can meaningfully swap one for the other.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:48 PM on June 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


You can be off the grid in a stand of forest of a number of acres small enough for nearly anyone who has a full time job to own without significant hardship, and probably closer to home than Green Bank.

Of course, doing all that is pretty silly when you could just go to a nearby park, national forest, or other relatively isolated campground and simply turn off your phone. Hell, in a lot of them you won't have to turn it off, it'll die plenty quick wasting a ton of battery searching for a signal it will never receive because, despite the hype, there are plenty of places in this nation of ours where there is no cell coverage.
posted by wierdo at 6:55 PM on June 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Used to spend my summers in Green Bank when I was a kid. My grandfather worked at the NRAO. Great town.
posted by snwod at 7:07 PM on June 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Go to just about any National Forest. Green Bank, bleh
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:56 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


Just leave your phone at home. It's not that hard.
posted by hippybear at 8:06 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


The only real solitude is the grave.
posted by aramaic at 8:30 PM on June 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


What SHEhe seems to be looking for is a disconnection from HERhis normal life, but not necessarily actually being alone.

Fixed that for ya! (though how would one guess that "Pagan" is a woman's name in this case? I just happened to exchange a tweet with her today and just reconfirmed what Wikipedia thinks their preferred pronouns are likely to be before posting.)
posted by stevil at 10:05 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


The astronomy club I was in in college stayed in one of the dorms at the observatory for the weekend. This was back in the days before mobile phones, before wireless Internet, even before the idea of tucking a bulky “portable” computer in your bag occurred to anyone. I think the only electronica Quitman I traveled with that weekend was my Sony Discman and some headphones.
posted by emelenjr at 4:22 AM on June 24, 2019


I have to go outside in my front yard to get a cell signal so I guess I live in a quiet zone? In the middle of a major metropolitan area?
posted by tivalasvegas at 4:51 AM on June 24, 2019


I didn't realize there were 'radio quiet zones' all around the United States where no gasoline engines, no wifi, no microwaves, and no radio signals, are permitted. Strange! I now wish I framed the post around the existence of such a place (with the supplementary articles), rather than whatever tendentious definition the author of NY Times article was working with. Surely the interesting question is the need for such a place to conduct research, not the search for solitude—as 'performative' as that may appear to be.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 8:36 AM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


If you are visiting the National Radio Quiet Zone, I recommend a stay at Amnesty Lodge, Kepler, WV.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:43 AM on June 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


There are of course a zillion radio signals in the quiet zone - ULF/VLF/LF natural and artificial radio signals can have ranges of many thousand miles, and shortwave broadcast, utility and ham signals will bounce off the ionosphere to land wherever they darn well like. If you really count 'no radio signals' as the sine qua non of solitude, you'll have to get into a Faraday cage.

It's easier to just not bring a radio with you, though.
posted by Devonian at 10:46 AM on June 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


That is interesting, Devonian. I can't help but think of John Cage, sitting alone, listening to his own heartbeat. Is the pronouncement of the zone as 'radio free' merely optimistic, an expression of desire or need? Obviously fewer signals than other areas but not entirely free of, as you note.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:05 AM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


Well the purpose of the RQZ is to allow researchers to hear some of those (especially the natural cosmic*) weak signals. So it's "quiet" in the relative sense, but not the absolute.

Getting absolute RF quiet is actually easier in some ways, because you just build a faraday cage. I suspect the inside of a microwave oven, turned off and unplugged, is probably pretty RF quiet. It may be quieter than Green Bank, in fact... but it wouldn't be much good for radioastronomy.

Basically the RQZ is the "be quiet" of a concert hall—it's so you can hear something else.

* I'm pretty sure though that the US Navy facility up there may, in fact, be the raison d'etre of the RQZ when it was originally created. I doubt the radio-astronomers had that much political pull. In the pre-ELINT satellite days, I can imagine having a quiet listening station for long-range Soviet transmissions, mostly HF stuff to ships and aircraft, was a Big Deal.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:57 PM on June 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


Yeah, we don't talk about the "Navy facility".

I guess I'm one of the astronomers referred to in the article, who "travel here to measure gravitational waves", except that we no longer travel to the site most of the time. I'm part of the NANOGrav collaboration, and we typically observe our target pulsars over multiple sessions every week.

Green Bank is a weird place - the observatory is amazing, obviously, but technology has impinged on the radio quiet zone a lot faster than we had hoped. I haven't been back in years - we run our observations remotely - but my first trip out to GB as a grad student, the radio on my rental car really did go into hunt mode across an expanse of static. The next time I went, there was a country music station that was audible all the way to the site, and nowadays there are multiple radio signals and weak spillovers of cellphone signals everywhere.

It's just that it is so hard to convince people about how freakishly weak the cosmic radio signals really are, and how astonishingly sensitive our telescopes need to be. NRAO used to have a collection of classic Checkers cabs on site, because they had diesel engines. No spark plugs - sparks produce impulsive radio interference across the entire spectrum. These days, it's all we can do to get NRAO's HR department to recall the FitBits they issued to the staff for "health and wellness" - those things use Bluetooth, come on! We're also in a stand-off with some automatic lawn mower company (Roombas for your lawn) - the way they tell lawn boundaries is by these little radio transmitters you place on the property lines, and that's not great for us. And now of course, there's Elon Musk's Starlink, which, well: "Little legal recourse for astronomers concerned about Starlink".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Meanwhile, what I remember most vividly about the rest of the town is that the selection of fresh food in the grocery store was awful - I was horrified by the potatoes on sale, which is just a weird little detail to have stuck in my mind.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:29 PM on June 24, 2019 [12 favorites]


I don't trust Musk any more.
posted by sneebler at 7:25 PM on June 24, 2019


The important thing for the quiet zone is not to have any local transmitters. All transmitters produce unwanted signals along with those they're designed to produce, including broadband noise. These can be engineered to be at a very low level, such that they drop below the natural noise floor over quite a short distance, but when you have lots of transmitters in an area - which is often, with personal technology- or if the transmitters are cheaply built or faulty, the effect can be cumulative and certainly enough to ruin an astronomer's day.

If transmitters were perfect, there wouldn't be a problem, but they can't be - although these days you can get very close by doing all the signal processing in software. You have to turn the numbers into a varying electric current in the end, though, and the components that do that will have characteristic noise in both amplitude and time domain that they can't help but add to the signal.
posted by Devonian at 8:53 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


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