The National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West Virginia, is an area where there are no cell service or wi-fi signals and almost every radio station has disappeared to keep the area very radio quiet and no interference allowed.
The zone was developed to protect a sophisticated radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observation from interference. This telescope is the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope and is as tall as the Washington Monument and large enough to fit 2 acres of land in it. It works by tracking and reading energy waves that come from stars or gases but have to be located in sparsely populated areas to avoid EMI.
