Can you make images of Wi‑Fi or mobile phone radio signals?

Asked 9/27/2015

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I know there are cameras for visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, and even X‑rays. Is there any practical way to "photograph" Wi‑Fi/WLAN or mobile phone radiation, perhaps as an overlay on a normal photo? I'm wondering whether radio-frequency signals can be imaged directly, and if so what the limitations are.

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

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In order to get an image, both the subject and the "camera" must be much larger than the wavelength of the light that you use for imaging. The wavelength of visible light is between approximately 400 and 800 nm, i.e. smaller than a µm.

Radio frequencies go up to several GHz, which corresponds to wavelengths of many centimeters. For example, the 2.4 GHz WIFI band has a wavelength of about 12.5 cm. Thus your camera would have to be several meters large, and you would only be able to image similarly large subjects. There are no radio-frequency cameras for our everyday world.

However, scientists have actually built "cameras" that are several meters wide, and use them to image very large objects such as stars and galaxies. These cameras are called radio telescopes.

Originally by user15676. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15676

10y ago

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Not in the normal photographic sense. Wi‑Fi and mobile-phone signals are radio waves with much longer wavelengths than visible light. For example, 2.4 GHz Wi‑Fi is about 12.5 cm wavelength, so achieving useful spatial resolution requires antennas/apertures that are large relative to that wavelength. That makes a normal handheld "camera" impractical for everyday scenes.

This is why radio imaging is usually done with very large systems, such as radio telescopes, to image very large subjects.

That said, there are experimental and computational ways to visualize radio signals. Using antennas, receivers, and software, researchers can reconstruct coarse images or depth information from Wi‑Fi reflections and multipath. These systems are not conventional cameras with lenses and sensors like visible-light cameras, and the resulting images are typically low-resolution and heavily processed.

So the short answer is: not as a standard consumer camera, but yes, radio-frequency imaging/visualization is possible with specialized hardware and computation.

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