Longtabber,
Besides the Navy tests of the Sniffex, similar products like the MOLE, Alpha 6, Quadro Tracker, etc have been tested by Sandia Laboratory and the National Institute of Justice.
Reading the articles, the engineers seem to be surprised someone would be so bold as to sell an empty plastic box with a radio antenna on it for $8000. But in fact, that is what they do. From their manual, the only coil or thing close to a wire in Sniffex seems to be a metal spring.
http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-do-experts-think-about-sniffex.html
http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-sniffex-really-first-of-its-kind.html
Prior analysis has shown the contents of these "detectors" to include:
- A piece of paper with a picture of explosives or drugs to program the detector.
- A piece of plastic with a substance consistent with human sweat
- A dead ant
Slowly but surely, we are going thru it
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Besides the Navy tests of the Sniffex, similar products like the MOLE, Alpha 6, Quadro Tracker, etc have been tested by Sandia Laboratory and the National Institute of Justice.
Yeah, I'm conversing with a guy I know who does testing for the NIJ to see what else there is. I really want to find an Army test of similar devices because I might actually get to get some of that firsthand information.
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Reading the articles, the engineers seem to be surprised someone would be so bold as to sell an empty plastic box with a radio antenna on it for $8000. But in fact, that is what they do.
Must be young engineers LOL. One thing i have learned in my 30+ yr career is that there is a separate entity known as the "business mind" that operates on some alien frequency. They have this idea that in order to show they are in line with the current "flavor of the month" business ideology ( be it safety,security, racial sensitivity or whatever)- they form a committee and cut a PO to buy the "solution" or use the most "simple" of flawed logic. ( they make me lots of money)
I know of 1 plant manager who thought he had the solution to cut his overhead and that was to fire his whole maintenance department because all of his operators "knew" their machines and could keep them in tip top shape he has now been terminated and we have a maintenance contract in place.
The good news is that this is rare in industry because there is normally an engineering proposal outlining what a device needs to do and a evaluation team comprised of engineers in the appropriate disciplines.
As far as the patent goes- you cant patent a theory but only an application of a theory and thats what has happened here.
As far as the theory goes, theoretically such a device is within the realm of engineering possibility in the general sense. ( as far as detecting a signature)
The problems creep in in the description of how the device applies the theory.
I can accept that an object could detect signatures but not at the ranges and conditions described.
I cannot accept that it could identify specifically anything or differentiate between signatures. ( I could accept it if this device was on a table in a lab and was used under controlled testing but even then, we need some more technology before it would be feasible- I cannot envision it under field conditions)
In short, the theory is possible but the described application isnt.
It will take a bit but we are going to do a detailed point by point analysis of each claim for future use.
