Like you, probably, I've had this nagging question sitting at the back of my mind for years. Wi-Fi in every room, a 5G tower down the road, phone in my pocket all day, power cables running through the walls behind my bed — is all of that actually fine, or am I bathing in invisible stuff and just hoping for the best? The honest answer was that I had no way of knowing. No way to see any of it. So I've spent the last stretch carrying the Milerd HiRange around with me — a pen-sized EMF meter that turns all that invisible noise into a number on a screen.

Today we're testing the Milerd HiRange in a normal day, not on a bench next to one router. My apartment here on the Gold Coast, my desk where I work for hours, my parents' place, inside the car, through a shopping centre, and out in the open. We'll see exactly where the numbers spike, where they drop, and what actually changes when you move something or step back a metre. Then you can decide what's worth rearranging in your own place.

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01What Is the Milerd HiRange?

The Milerd HiRange is a handheld EMF meter — a detector for electromagnetic fields. It measures four things: radio frequency radiation (Wi-Fi, mobile phones, 5G, Bluetooth), low-frequency magnetic fields (power lines, motors, charger transformers), low-frequency electric fields (wiring and appliances), and a 30-day accumulated dose so you can see your exposure over time instead of one snapshot.

On the RF side it covers 1 MHz all the way to 8 GHz, plus low and high ranges for electric and magnetic fields. Translation: it sees pretty much everything from your phone and your router through to the wiring in the walls. And it's tiny — about the size of a pen, around 55 grams, with a colour display and a battery that runs up to a week of continuous use, charging over USB-C. It's genuinely plug-and-play: press the button, the display lights up, done. There's a little wrist band in the box so you can hold it while you walk, but most of the time you just lay it flat in your hand, point it at whatever you're measuring, and let the numbers settle.

02The Three Screens: Search, Statistics & Lab

You only really need to learn three screens. Search mode is where you'll live: a bar graph and a colour indicator — green is low, yellow is moderate, red is high. That's the one for walking slowly around a room watching for the jump. When something spikes, you stop, hold it there for a few seconds, and let the reading stabilise.

Hold the button down and you get the statistics screen — minimum, average and peak over a short period. That's the one to use when you want to stand next to a router or a microwave for a minute and see what it actually does, rather than catching it mid-flicker. Then there's lab mode, which puts all six measurements on one screen — RF, low and high magnetic, low and high electric, plus the accumulated dose. That's for nerds like me, but it's handy when you want the whole picture in one glance.

There's also a desktop app, Milerd Port, for Windows and Mac — you dump your data across and read it back as charts. I stuck to what's on the device for this test, but it's there if you want to track things properly over weeks.

03The Apartment Test: My Desk Was the Problem

I started at home, because that's where you spend the hours that matter. Standing in the middle of the apartment — beach one way, lounge the other — everything read fine. Green across the board. Which was reassuring for about ninety seconds, because then I walked over to the desk.

The desk is where I work. It's also, it turns out, where the Wi-Fi router sits. The meter went from calm to flashing red on radio waves the moment I got near it, and the closer I moved to the router the harder it spiked. I tapped into the detail view to check I wasn't imagining it — there's the graph, and there's the spike, clear as anything. The computer being on barely moved the needle. It was the router, and I've been sitting a metre from it for years without a second thought.

04My Parents' Place: It Was the Clock

Next stop, my parents' house. Walked in with the meter running and it stayed green through the main living area, which is exactly what you want to see. So I did a slow lap with the camera to find anything that wasn't.

And the one thing that lit up was the clock. Not the TV, not the kitchen — the clock. Held it up close and the reading climbed straight away; held the button down for the detail graph and there it was. Then I stepped back, and it settled. Move a pillow's distance away and it's dropping off already. That's the lesson from this whole video in one small moment: close to the thing, it reads; a step back, it doesn't. Worth checking the little stuff you'd never suspect — clocks, alarm units, anything with a transformer sitting near where somebody sleeps.

05The Car Test: It Was My Own Phone

I had the car running and the meter flashed red, which had me curious. Drove around with it for a bit, checked it properly, and the car itself came out fine. The one thing it was consistently picking up was the phone in my pocket.

Which is a fair result, honestly. Phones transmit, that's the job. But it's a useful thing to actually see rather than assume — if you use this in the car, you'll quickly work out that most of what you're measuring is whatever you brought in with you.

06The Shopping Centre: Where It Went Properly High

Then the one I was most curious about. In the middle of a shopping centre the RF readings climbed into the high single figures on the scale and stayed there — different spots, different spikes, and some of them very high indeed. Not surprising when you think about it: dozens of shops, dozens of Wi-Fi networks, everybody's phone, plus whatever the building itself is running.

Walking around, you can watch the number move from aisle to aisle, and you can see the accumulated dose ticking up while you stand there — which is the part that made it click for me. One reading is a snapshot. The dose is the thing that tells you where you're actually spending your time. Same trick works in an office, if you want to know what your desk is doing over a week.

07Hidden Cameras, Wall Wiring & the Other Uses

Here's the bit I didn't expect to care about. Because the HiRange reads RF, it can help you spot hidden cameras and listening devices in a hotel room or an Airbnb — anything transmitting has to give itself away eventually. That's a real worry for a lot of people who travel, and it's a genuine second reason to have this in the bag.

The other one is practical: locating wiring inside walls. If you're doing repairs or a renovation and you'd rather not put a screw through a live cable, running the meter along the wall gives you a much better idea of where things run. Neither of these is why I bought it, and both of them are why I've kept carrying it.

08The 30-Day Accumulated Dose

This is the feature that separates it from a one-off gadget. Instead of only telling you what's happening right now, the HiRange logs a 30-day accumulated dose — so you get a trend rather than a moment. A single reading next to a router tells you almost nothing about your life. A month of readings tells you whether your desk, your bedroom and your commute add up to much of anything.

I've only had it running for weeks, not a full month, so I'll be straight with you: I can't show you the finished 30-day picture yet. Once it's been running properly I'll do a follow-up with the full dose reading and how much moving a few things around actually changed it. That's the honest state of play.

⚙Specs at a Glance

The colour indicator is the part that makes it usable for normal people. You don't need to understand a single unit of frequency to get value out of it — green, yellow, red, plus a graph and a 30-day history, and that's enough to make a better decision about where you sleep and where you sit for eight hours.

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