Wolfhound Used To Sniff Out Contraband Cell Phones, Isn't A Real Dog

You may have missed it, but back in July, the House of Representatives here in the United States put a ban on prisoners having access to mobile phones. The same rules apply in prison systems all over the world; for example, a gadget called the Wolfhound was just used to find 10 contraband cell phones being utilized inside a prison in Bangkok, Thailand. And, as you can imagine, it's not a real dog.

From the picture above, we can tell that the device itself is pretty simple: solely designed to find the RF energy given off by cell phones, the Wolfhound is a cheap, portable, and easy-to-use alternative to the system currently in place. The unit is manufactured by Berkeley Varitronics, which has been in the industry for more than 35 years. The Wolfhound is perfectly capable of finding those RF signals even through concrete walls, which means that it should be able to find cell phones quite easily. And since it's not capable of blocking a cell phone's signal, which many infrastructure usages do now, the portable unit will be far more usable in other situations. Though, we imagine that if prison administrations around the world are toughening up on cell phones in prison cells, this would be the easiest way to find and dispose of them.

[via Gearlog]