Enter The Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned

There are no physical signs you've entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West Virginia. But the silence gives you a signal.

Somewhere around the Virginia-West Virginia state line, the periodic buzzes and pings of smartphones stopped. "Zero [service]. Searching," said National Public Radio photographer John Poole. Almost every radio station disappeared, too, except for Allegheny Mountain Radio, which broadcasts at a low enough frequency to avoid being banned. The inconsistent connectivity is because the county sits within a zone designed to protect a sophisticated radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from interference. The energy of Wi-Fi or cell signals can confuse or interfere with the telescope's readings — and it can trip the receivers at the government's nearby Sugar Grove research facility, which is also in the zone. "Because we're looking at these very, very faint signals, we need to live in a very, very quiet area. In the same way where if you had an optical telescope, it needs to be high on the mountain away from other light," Karen O'Neill, who oversees the site, says. So a federal quiet zone law and an accompanying state law — the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zoning Act — combine to keep the area very radio quiet. No interference is allowed. "We still have communications. I mean, it's just ... older. Dial-up telephones. We still have phone booths," says Chuck Niday, an engineer for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a volunteer at Allegheny Mountain Radio.

Emergency communications are allowed in the zone, as is ham radio, a hobby among a set of West Virginians who chitchat or coordinate plans over their ham radios as they would their cellphones — if they had cellphones.