Re: Comment on Somewhere.com's Boston Radio Watch

["Aaron 'Bishop' Read" <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 10:19 PM 5/17/2002, Dan Strassberg wrote:
>(snip)
>Affected.") Although the NIMBYs have lots of statistics, there seems to be
>no way to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the VHF/UHF
>fields and breast cancer. But high-intensity UHF fields, such as those to
>which you would be exposed if you hovered in a helicopter a few feet from
>the top of a UHF-TV transmitting tower, are recognized as ionizing
>radiation. On the other hand, the fields from a 50-kW AM station, which are
>only about 1% as great as those from a UHF TV station with an ERP of 5
>million watts and are at a frequency of about 0.2% of UHF frequencies, are
>not considered to be ionizing. Moreover, as far as I know, though ionizing
>radiation is suspected of causing cancer, no cause-and-effect relationship
>has ever been proven. Furthermore, to my knowledge, nobody has ever
>demonstrated that a UHF TV station's field strength at ground level comes
>within orders of magnitude of the field strength necessary to produce
>ionization.
>(snip)

Heh - reminds me of a town (that shall remain nameless to protect the 
Luddites) that's written a bylaw that forces cellphone towers be at least 
1000ft from any residential or commercial lots.   Makes sense until you 
realize that most towers' cell antennas are designed to have their most 
powerful RF lobes hit the ground about 1200ft out or so...so in reality 
you're exposed to less RF standing 100ft from the tower than you are 1000ft 
from it.   And for that matter, does a 3dB difference mean anything when 
you're already 60dB below the legal safety limit?   It's like saying 
there's a difference in light between a 2 watt lightbulb and a 3 watt, 
neither is going to hurt your eyes no matter how close or far you are to it.

And, of course, these are the same people who gripe about how there's no 
cellphone coverage in their town...grrrrrr


______________________________________________
Aaron "Bishop" Read       aread@speakeasy.net
Fried Bagels Consulting   www.friedbagels.com
34 Kirkwood Rd. / Boston, MA / 02135 (as of 6/1/02)