Fun with RF Meter: Wireless Home Telephone

Telephone and RF Meter

What's going on?
I was making a phone call recently to a customer service department, got put on hold for a long while, and decided to mess around with some of the things around me. One of those things was an RF meter -- yes, I have one because I'm a nerd. This was used to make a few videos a while back, thought it'd never really be used again. Turns out I was wrong.

RF Meter + Wireless Home Telephone
Anyway, I turned the RF meter on and was a bit surprised at the reading. The telephone was a wireless home phone, so it was obvious that some sort of wireless technology was going to be used. According to the specs as I understood them, the meter should have been able to pick up something put out by the phone that made it work wirelessly, and it did. However, I was a bit surprised by the reading on the meter relative to other things I've measured.

What I found was that there were at least two different reading levels depending on where the phone was in relation to the base station. A brick wall or two versus a clear-his line of sight produced different readings. Check out the video linked below showing what I saw!

In no way should the readings from the meter be considered accurate as it has not been independently checked for accuracy. And more importantly, the operator is not trained and not knowledgeable concerning radio frequency related matters.


Reminder: Accuracy Not Guaranteed