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Repel Bugs With Your Cell Phone
telstar writes "Starting Monday, SK Telecom Co. in South Korea will begin offering a ringtone designed to repel mosquitoes for the one-time price of $2.50. The ringtone, inaudible to humans, has a range of three feet, and functions just like any other ring-tone from your cell." Now if only there was a ringtone to repel bugs in code! Sorry, I'm full of bad jokes today.
Anyone use this software? Does it work? Seems like it could be apdapted to a PDA.
"Customers can then play the sound by hitting a few buttons on their mobile phones." come on, it wasn't anywhere close to being a long article, and even the basic concept is kind of common sense :(
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Not at all. Inaudable beepers supposedly designed to repel mosquitoes are a relatively long-running case of modern snake oil. Any Boy Scout can tell you about the only thing that actually is effective against mosquitoes: Bug spray containing DEET.
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The company claimed that the service worked during tests. ...yes. But they fail to mention that every other ring tone repels the bloodsuckers just as well. The minor EM field generated when the phone rings screws with their sensory equipment.
Even if the ringtone format can represent tones that high, can the cellphone speaker reproduce them? Again, many speakers are only rated to about 20 KHz, because that's all that's useful for human beings.
And finally, couldn't you just make a device for about $5 that would actually do this right and last a whole lot longer on a set of batteries? Cell phones are not the right way to make a constant 40KHz (say) tone.
I'm inclined to categorize this the same way I categorize stand-alone sonic pest-repelling devices: well-intentioned but useless. Incidentally, that's the category I put normal cell phones in as well. :)
The Straight Dope has the full scoop on ultrasonic insect repellents. In short, they're a scam.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Check out what Cecil has to say.
I'm not going to answer your last question, H., because ultrasonic mosquito repellers all have one thing in common: none of them work. At all.
[snip]
Some ultrasound firms say their products will also repel mice, rats, roaches, bats, fleas, spiders, and the like. The evidence to date suggests these claims are greatly exaggerated. At best they work only when used in conjunction with a concerted anti-pest program involving traps, improved sanitation, elimination of entry points and nesting places, and so on. So don't throw away that flyswatter yet.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
OMG! Wau!
www.mosquitomagnet.com might shed some light on it.
.unsigged
Here is a pretty thorough study:
Comparative Efficacy of Insect Repellents against Mosquito Bites
and here is a table that shows the results: Protection Times of Insect Repellants
Seems Soybean Oil(2%) can protect for 90 minutes, Citronella(10%) for 20 minutes and DEET(24%) for 5 hours.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Korean's are *paranoid* about mosquitos I mean freaking irrational.
Yeah, malaria(along with a dozen other various mosquito-born illnesses) can tend to make you that way.
The difference between here and there is that most of the mosquitoes ARE carrying something- I remember there was a travel advisory about it at one point. Here in the US, you have a greater chance of winning the lottery than catching, say, West Nile disease, which the press has been beating to death("dead bird found!" "dead bird has west nile!" etc etc.)
Please help metamoderate.
Dry Ice is the hot tip. Place a block in a remote corner of the area of your next outdoor grilling event, and you'll suffer nary a bite.
Mosquitos find their targets from the trail of carbon dioxide left behind by exhaling. So I have heavy doubts about this Korean invention working at all. What does work so far are those traps with their own CO2 generators. (But even then it is not perfect.)
Those high frequency sound generators may repel mice and rats, but only for a short period of time. What happens is that their offspring will come back to re-infest the area. The difference between the off-spring and the parents is that the kiddie rodents will be born deaf. Rodents like roaches are highly adaptive. (Got that little tidbit of information from someone who used to work in the exterminator business.)
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin