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HERF Gun: Make it in your basement

CuriousGeorge113 was the first one to write us about the homemade HERF gun an engineer unveiled at Infowarcon '99. All stuff that you can buy from a hardware store, and disable computers at varying range, depending on size. The current model does not do permanent damage, unlike EMP.

5 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. ... technology dating back to Tesla ... by Pegasus · · Score: 4

    Finnaly someone showed this to the public. It really is an old idea, but in the world we live now, it has some interesting effects.
    I was tracing the development of such toys based on Nikola Tesla's ideas for a while now and found a lot of impresive stuff. Just do a quick search on "telsa weapon" and read some of the articles that pop up. One of the most scary is located at http://www.peg.apc.org/~nexus/bskies1[2345].html (yeah thats five parts of it). Hints about causing earthquakes with similiar technology as described in the story above. Other interesting sites are Gravity gate (http://www.starwon.com.au/~rayd/index.htm), Kelly BBS (www.kellynet.com), Tesla web ring and similiar. If you like to search a lot, you may even find hints about top secret super high tech weapons developed in Russia for knocking out satelites, which are also based on one of the Tesla's ideas and are powered by also originaly Tesla's work, improved by dr. H. Moray, the so called Moray generator. Basicaly you just set up an antenna and some electronic wizardry and you have electricity. Sounds too good to be true, but there's a story on the kellynet about how Tesla made an electric car powered by such a device.
    Back to the EMP stuff...does anyone have some nice information about project HAARP and similiar "experiments" all around the world? I heard somewhere that US military already developed their small EMP "bomb" for knocking out "e-criminals". I would like to take a look at one of those toys :) And the next thing would be to cover my house entirely in somekind of conductive mesh, to make more or less effective faradey cage. I feel like protecting computers and other electronic equipment will be big bussiness in the next decades.

  2. Its a tesla coil with a director/reflector antenna by anticypher · · Score: 5

    All this guy has done is built a simple pulsed DC Tesla coil using some sort of vibrator and a huge step-up transformer. Lots of people have done that, its nothing new.

    He'd have to have at least three stages of RLC circuits to get an efficient power coupling into the antenna and then radiated off into the ether (maybe he has, it doesn't show in the photo). Yes, it can be done by winding your own coils, and buying an old 20kV capacitor from an electric company auction or scrap dealer. Then you would have a very effective disruptor of unprotected electronics (but not likely to cause permanent damage except with a proximity of a few inches). Making it highly directional is left as an exercise for the student ;-)

    Years ago I helped tune a HUGE multi-stage step up system to duplicate the experiments of Nikola Tesla (sending spark gap morse code). This guy had built it into his garage, and had collected huge old power supplies from an old AM radio station to power it. We tested it briefly for a few seconds each evening. Whenever we worked on it, one of his cooler neighbors came over to play with it as well. Seems that every time it was switched on, all radio and cable TV reception in the area was overpowered. Fluorescent lights glowed up to 30 feet away, and nearby computers would crash.

    For a few months there were cable TV trucks patrolling his neighborhood with all kinds of detecting/directional antennas looking for the source of the HERF (he kept it off most of the time), eventually they posted reward notices on phone poles in the area. He dismantled his whole setup and moved it that day (his house has never been cleaner :-). Cops came around the next day with a search warrant, didn't find anything and left. Now he only does his experiments in an old barn in the middle of nowhere, with no electical lines nearby. Any cars driving near the place stall and the CD player will skip, and he advises leaving all credit cards and watches somewhere else when visiting. I think some day he will actually discover zero-point energy or tap into the earth's natural resonance of 12Hz.

    I cringe when I think of how this idea will be mutilated by the movie industry. A HERF gun that looks like an M16 or a .45 caliber pistol and shoots star-wars-like bolts of light, or the death ray in "Revenge of the Pink Panther", or the size of a packet of cigarets with some big LED numbers counting down with an audible click.

    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  3. Oooh. This is great! by mcolin · · Score: 4

    Now I can finally shut down those Britney Spears sounds my neighbor is bombarding our street with. Aaaah, blissful silence!

  4. Imagine the possibilities by emag · · Score: 4
    I've wanted to build one of these things for at least 8 years now, but have never had a) the time, b) the knowledge, c) the motivation. Especially after reading (parts of) Winn Schwarau's "Information Warfare" doorstop, I could just see the potential uses for this.

    Imagine one of these scenarios:
    • You're driving down the highway, blissfully ignorant of the speed limit. Suddenly, you see those blue and red lights flashing behind you. Panic? You? Nah. You hit that extra button below the rear defroster, and suddenly you're in the clear. Or better yet, you let yourself get pulled over, and then while waiting to ask if there's a problem, the other car starts acting funny...

    • From the book: Someone in a van drives around the computing center of a bank. Hits a button. Computers start to drool. Wait a random amount of time, do it again.

    • Your (former) employer doesn't believe that they need to worry about information warfare because "the firewall will protect us." Wait for the night before a drop, or the day of a demo, and suddenly the development machines, not to mention the firewall, are dead.


    As much as I'd love to have plans for one of these HERF guns, I think that it would probably make it too easy for "hardware script kiddies" to then go out and wreak havoc. What I'd really like is a reading list (preferably with difficulty ratings) on what to study to be able to design your own.
    --
    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
  5. Possible use of this device by Markee · · Score: 5

    Everyone's afraid of a new class of terrorism that seems to be emerging. Bombing and shooting people is for dumbos. These days, smart terrorists disrupt the use of technologies like phone, cell phone and computers. This is a device for them.
    Imagine this device placed near a major phone line hub... within view of a cell phone transmitter... on a highway bridge, the latest "drive-by-wire" cars passing beneath it... on an airport... at a stock exchange... Devices like this, at a handy size, could be as dangerous to economics as a gun is to an individual.
    I wonder if there is a law against things like that.

    --
    Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?