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.

Comments

hype.

[urbazewski]

I bought several little devices that suposedly emitted an inaudible tone to repel mosquitoes to take with me to Indonesia, which I ordered from a catalog of "environmentally sound" products (they were solar powered, if I recall). I chucked them after a week, after watching a mosquito land on one. I've heard similarly bad reviews of other "inaudible" products...

"The Company Claimed..."

[Ted_Green]

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.

Ringtone storage format?

[Patrick]

What format are ringtones stored in that they can represent tones beyond the range of human hearing? Most audio formats top out around 22 or 24 KHz tones (44.1 or 48 KHz sampling). My last cell phone only allowed the notes available on a piano, none of which is beyond human hearing.

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. :)

Crapola

[Reality Master 101]

The Straight Dope has the full scoop on ultrasonic insect repellents. In short, they're a scam.

Don't work

[Nick Number]

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.