Last summer my young nephew
visited by train and stayed overnight. Questioning him on arrival, “Yes” he’d
turned off his smart-phone and his tablet computer as well as his e-reader
and Bluetooth® headphones and left his Fit-Bit® at home. He assured me he had
nothing else wireless.
I checked with my EMFields
Acousticom2 just to be sure and everything was quiet. We had dinner together and talked
until late. He went to bed in the guest room and I turned off the mains, as I routinely
do. Imagine then my surprise at about 6am the following morning soundly asleep in
the room next door, when I was suddenly and brutally yanked wide awake by
repeated slams to my head. I could not endure the beating and had
to immediately get up and flee. I checked with my Acousticom2 and sure enough, there was
what I deduced was a Bluetooth®
transmitting device somewhere in the house. From downstairs it was clear the
signal was coming from his room. I went for a walk to get out of range,
reluctant to wake my nephew after his long journey and upon my return a couple of
hours later I questioned him, quite vigorously.
“No”, he assured me, he “really
did not have anything else that could be transmitting.”
A moment later he said,“Ah....It could be the Chipolo®.”
“What the hell is a Chipolo®?” I said, unimpressed.
“Dad gave it to me because I kept losing my keys.” he said. “Its a
tracker.”
He ferreted in his bag and produced a little black disc attached to
his keys. My meter confirmed it was indeed the offending source of the sudden
attack that had catapulted me from my bed.
A Chipolo® is sealed-for-life,
a little larger than a 50 pence piece and costs around £20. A quick on-line search revealed it also comes in a credit-card sized
equivalent. Battery life is advertised as a year. Unable to turn it off, we
removed the little bugger, wrapped it in aluminium foil in a vain attempt to
isolate it and resorted to placing it in the shed far away from the house.
Electro hyper sensitives (EHS) are often affected more severely when
they are inactive i.e. when stationary/sleeping so how had I been fine all
evening and able to sleep soundly through the night?
It appears, to save battery life, the device hibernates when it gets no response. At around 6am each day, forestry
lorries start to come past the house. I can only conclude that a smart-phone in
one of the passing cabs, constantly sniffing for any Bluetooth® device, had woken the Chipolo® and me, up. By co-opting other people’s Bluetooth® devices, the short-range Chipolo® transmitter can hop, skip and jump via
Wi-Fi and the Internet to anywhere in the world. Low-powered Bluetooth® tracking devices can thus be located even
when their paired device is out of range.
How on earth is an EHS sufferer to counter similar
silent and insidious attacks from now common personal wireless devices that are
typically hidden from view?
How is anyone else supposed to believe the poor unfortunate (and oft
ridiculed) EHS sufferer when such occurrences are so far beyond public awareness?
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