NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy 481
prostoalex writes "The New York Times discusses the controversy of placing cell phone towers on top of hills, a practice to which many people object. According to the article, people frequently complain about the visual impediment and are afraid that property values will decline or some health damage will be done with radio waves. At the same time, people get quite irritated when proper phone service is not provided by the operators, and the calls keep dropping or coverage is poor outside of densely populated areas. Phone companies also lease the land to place the cell phone tower for $30,000-$50,000, which is attractive to many landowners, but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
Sweet Deal (Score:5, Informative)
What really makes the deal sweet though is that the amount of land taken up by the tower is really small, and you're free to do anything else on the land that you want. I suppose what they're really leasing from you is the privlege to put a tower on your property.
In my mother's case it's a rental property with a fair amount of land, and the tower sits back far from the house. So it doesn't really interfere with the tennants lives, and it basically gives her money-for-nothing every month.
Damage via cell phone rad (Score:3, Informative)
Radiation is not like other everyday occurances, either radiation ionizes your molecules/atoms, or it dosen't. It's not like pushing a car down the road, where you will get thre no matter what, its just a mater of time, no. It's more like pushing a car up a hill, either your strong enough, or not.
Thats is why lab rats get cancer, or other assorted forms of doom, when they are exposed to "Cell phone like radiation", they get a higher dose to 'accelerate' (change the outcome of, whatever) the experiment. If they were given the dose that you recieve from standing a few hundred feet from a tower, or holding a cell phone an inch or so from your brain the rats would have jack.
Do some research, folks. Better yet, how bout the media do a bit of reporting! Tell folks what I just did, DUMB IT DOWN, make peoiple understand that unless the tests are fair, they mean SQUAT.
Sorry for all the shouting. False science makes me angry. You should hear me in my programing class.
Re:A Little Creativity Please ... (Score:5, Informative)
Utility Camo ... (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA - Or just look at the pictures (Score:1, Informative)
"The towers, sometimes disguised as fir trees, cacti or flagpoles, were once confined mostly to sparsely populated stretches of highway or industrial zones. More are being planted in residential areas as the wireless companies - responding to subscriber demands - race to build their networks for seamless coverage."
Look at the article to see the pictures of the mentioned cacti and fir tree
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
Beware of link in summary (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure what else it does as I'm running OmniWeb on my Mac, but Windows users beware.
Clean link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal (Score:5, Informative)
For instance:
http://campus.champlain.edu/faculty/whitmore/img/
or
http://danbricklin.com/log/0f010790.jpg [danbricklin.com]
or
http://www.80acres.com/Stupid%20things/stupid_thi
Is it a cell tower.. or a tree? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Beware of link in summary (Score:5, Informative)
No, it doesn't, NYT articles linked from iWon don't require registration and login.
Re:smokestacks (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Damage via cell phone rad (Score:3, Informative)
The technique of applying a high-intensity magnetic pulse to a human's brain to produce a neural disconnect is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magneti
Fascinating stuff, really.
Re:NIMBY is what's going to screw us... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You haven't been in some small communities, the (Score:3, Informative)
From now on, instead of calling those who object to antennas "luddites" I'll call them art students. Wonderful euphemism.
Re:Learn some physics, lemming (Score:2, Informative)
True.
There is no such bullshit threshold where above X watt it's ionizing, under X watt it's not ionizing. If a single photon can cause a transition in an atom or mollecule, it will. That's the only either-or condition.
Also mostly true. Whether or not a particular form of "radiation" is ionizing has more to do with the amount of energy each particle carries. This is related to the frequency of the radiation, not the amount of power behind the radiation source. More power produces more photons, not faster protons.
Electromagnetic waves within the band of frequencies generally referred to as "radio frequencies" are not ionizing. This does not begin to occur until you reach somewhere in the ultra-violet range.
RF exposure is a interesting area. AFAIK, however, there is no conclusive evidence that radio frequency waves cause any harm at athermal power levels.
Re:Learn some physics, lemming (Score:3, Informative)
Re:New ebay auction. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Learn some physics, lemming (Score:2, Informative)
Either the photon has enough energy to be ionizing (for a particular atom or molecule) or it does not - that is true. The important part is if that particular reaction will happen. The interaction cross section gives the statistics to tell you how common that particular reaction is (and therefore how likely it is to happen at a given density of photons and atoms/molecules). "Pumping more watts" does indeed make a difference if the statistical probability of the interaction is more than 0% and less than 100%. The other alternative is to increase the number of particles the photon passes through, thereby increasing the chance the interaction will happen.
Factoids (Score:3, Informative)
- The fake tree approach is made difficult by the fact that the towers need to be extremely stiff. The antennas are tuned to radiate very precise flat lobes with minimal back/up/down-scatter. Even a bit of flex ruins the pattern. That's why the flagpoles and trees look so ungainly and out-of-proportion.
- Camouflage - fake trees, fake flagpoles, fake chimneys, etc. - are ungodly expensive. You can make a fake chimney, but it has to be out of fiberglass sculpted to match the building. There can be no internal metal frame which would block the signal, and even sharp interior corners of the fiberglass panels were rejected by the RF engineers. When you try to blend something into a building facade, differential weathering of exposed surfaces makes the antenna show up anyway, and you have to keep sending out painters to reapply the "make-up". $$$ The trees have to be made out of something that will stand up to weather and look OK for many years. Pine needles (fake trees are almost always "pines") in front of the antennas have to be designed not to scatter the signal. Who wants to climb the pole and replace branches? $$$
- Overly tall poles are rare. The higher the pole, the more other cells that pole can "see", the more interference. You only see really tall poles or towers in very flat areas where the RF engineers can spread things way out. In even modest topography, the coverage area per pole is surprisingly small. This is exacerbated, as pointed out in the article, by the rising demand for "in-building coverage" which requires much stronger signals.
- The best solution I was never able to implement was one which strung a series of small antennas along existing power/phone pole lines. Planners in the rich suburbs were much more amenable to this kind of thing, and the tech exists somewhat, but negotiating an agreement among the several utility companies who own the poles and right-of-ways jointly proved infuriating to the the (unbelievably impatient and fractious) cellphone companies.
- My advice: If you're rich and you're about to get a tree tower giving you the finger from the highest hill in your otherwise pristine town, hire a consultant to negotiate a deal with your utility companies to let the wireless carriers string tiny repeaters down your streets. If you make an alternative available, the wireless company pretty much has to take it.
Re:Learn some physics, lemming (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, as someone who spent several years dealing with atomic spectroscopy in college, I can tell you that you are wrong. There are two photon transitions, and even three, four, etc ones. My PhD work was based on two-photon ionization of sodium (and a few other atoms). Smack sodium with "orange photons" (D lines), and then with a UV photon, and bingo, they're ionized.
The 'cross-section' for multi-photon events is smaller than for single ones, typically, because both photons need to be there almost simultaneously, so yes, there is a difference between having a small number of photons and a large number -- the latter being more likely to cause a transition. And even with single photon events, the more photons you have the more likely at least one is going to cause a transition, especially for some of the smaller cross-section events.
And, of course, the more photons, the more atoms that are likely to absorb something, even if all it does take is one to have some effect. You could easily survive one single photon event somewhere in your body; you wouldn't survive a billion of them quite so easily.
So, summary: it's not one or none, and more is worse.
Re:It's not quite that simple (Score:2, Informative)