Re: amplifying square wave sonically?

There was a thread a while back about what it would take to "zap" a large agricultural field to get rid of critters, but that still centered on applying electric current, as opposed to some other wave.

There are not many options. You could thump the ground very fast, the way a sub-woofer turns your floor into a speaker, but not at the frequencies discussed around here. Any basic seismology book or site discusses the "bandwidth" of the ground, and it ain't much. High power, high frequency acoustic drivers are out there, especially in military weapons research, and they can be directional, but they are expensive. Light is an option, and again there is research in this area in both military and medical areas. But almost everything about zappers today focuses on the effects of an electric field, or electric current (or both) on cellular biology.

It comes down to research. I don't confuse the documentation of a zapper's effectiveness with the explanations of its effectiveness. In other words, assuming that every report of a zapper's effectiveness is true, that says *nothing* about whether or not the explanation of how a zapper "works" is correct. Is it the amplitude of the voltage, the current, both? If the zapper effect is based on resonant frequencies, can a harmonic field with only 7 or 8 frequencies really affect hundreds of different organisms? If the electric field induces some kind of physical vibration in the pathogen cells, then an acoustic option makes sense. Otherwise, if it really is a field effect, than a light options seems like a good line of investigation. But if you don't know the basis for the basic effect, then random foraging through other technologies seems inefficient at best.

OTOH, that is exactly the way Edison invented the light bulb...

ak
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