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Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by xxpor on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:02PM (#19675822)
It's all nonsense. The higher frequencies are non-ionizing and in common use today. See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band

The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by macawfish on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @03:57PM (#19676755)
Why is it that you can just dismiss the hesitancy of more than a hundred researchers with PhD's in a wide range of relevant disciplines who have made careers out of studying this kind of thing by simply posting a comment saying "it's all nonsense"?

https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal

ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.

Electromagnetic radiation is used as a signaling medium for countless lifeforms on earth, including the cells and microbes in our own bodies.

Imagine if some alien creature decided they wanted to flash relatively bright blue light across the entire surface planet, day and night at frequencies that known to induce epileptic seizures. It'd affect your quality of life and mine. For some people, it'd be devastating.

Just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

I fail to see how a blanket dismissal of peoples concerns, however uninformed many of them may be, counts as "rational"!

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by cloakandswagger on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @04:14PM (#19676896)
I can find 100 crackpot scientists as easily as I can find 100 crackpot doctors or mathematicians.

Instead of appeals to authority, why can't we work with the facts and evidence that we have already (those overwhelmingly disproving the health hazards of 5G)?

"Peoples concerns" equate to the desire to halt all human progress out of some bizarre mix of paranoia and Neo-Luddism.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by hutzlibu on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:39AM (#19680790)
"why can't we work with the facts and evidence that we have already (those overwhelmingly disproving the health hazards of 5G)?"

Yeah well, I'd like to see that overwhelming evidence please.

But since, I am not a biologist nor physicist, I could not really examine it in detail. So I would have to believe the authorative power of the experts who day it is all good.

Then I compare the arguments to the experts who say yes.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by throwaway995669 on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @04:30PM (#19677032)
That's an ad hominem attack.

It's an inconvenient possibility (not going to call it truth) that our technology might be hurting us. We're addicted to technology the same way smokers are addicted to nicotine.

Smoking was at one time considered healthy and promoted by doctors, and now where are we?

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by neuronic on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:53AM (#19680873)
Technology is a religion to this forum, so good luck convincing others that electromagnetic radiation might have an impact on human biology that is not well understood.

If it doesn't cook you like microwaves or causes radiation sickness 3 hours after exposure it is immediately declared universally safe.

Of course that's negligent at best. Looks like we will live through in vivo testing for those questions, I suppose.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by throwaway995669 on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @12:04PM (#19683765)
Yep, totally get it. That's why I'm using a throwaway, I'm a heretic to the highest, on the level of an anti-vaxxer.
Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by ffellow on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:45AM (#19680828)
>ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.

I took a random one for the country I live in: According to wikipedia, this person who got his PhD in 1973 and has since retired has done research in 'quantum philosophy and spirituality'.

The second one, retired also, is a biologist who researched subterranean mammals. He and his team got an Ig-Nobel price in 2014 for their finding that dogs align themselves to earth's magnetic field when pooping.

I'm not sure I want to continue.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by adsfqwop on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @07:22AM (#19681539)
> that dogs align themselves to earth's magnetic field when pooping.

Well actually that seems like relevant information for this topic, because if that is true it means that dogs can sense magnetic fields. And as we know RF waves are composed of both an electric and magnetic component.

So this guy might actually know something that the rest of us do not know. If dogs can sense magnetic fields, it means electromagnetic radiation could have an unknown impact on their sense of direction. Sounds important to me.

Here's another guy that seems to know what he is talking about.

Prof. Olle Johansson, Ph.D., Dept. of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Sweden

Seems like someone you might want to listen to, especially since he has participated in several studies on this subject:

https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/the-work-of-olle-johansso...

You can also find his talks on the subject on Youtube, which I suggest people watch. They are very easy to listen to, and provides a good introduction to these topics.

Then we have this guy:

Dr. Paul Héroux, Ph.D., Director, Occupational Health Program, McGill University; InvitroPlus Labs, Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill University, Canada

He was commissioned by the electrical power companies to actually invent the RF dosimeter in 1991, that many use now to gauge exposure levels.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1930308

I'd certainly want to know what he has to say. Let's look at some of the rest:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=H%C3%A9roux%20P%5B...

Several publications relating EMF exposure. I think we want to know what he has to say also.

So perhaps you should not have give up so easily, and continued to look a little further instead. We want to look for the people who have the expertise in this field, and listen to what they have to say.

To finish off, I'd like to know where are the scientists that have studied this subject as extensively as someone like Heroux or Johansson, and are willing to sign their names on a pledge of microwave safety for all of humanity. I haven't seen such a list.

"The 5G recommendation for global irradiation. Go ahead, we take responsibility for full irradiation." In fact there is no such recommendation, as both insurance companies and even the cellular manufacturers are increasingly distancing themselves from liability.

That's what I call a clue.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by xxpor on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @04:10PM (#19676863)
>ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

Show me one species that uses GHz signalling.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by lima on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:49PM (#19676215)
> Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out.

Nope, they wouldn't. The standing wave would break down as soon as it left the enclosure. It would still be a potentially harmful amount of radiation, but not like that.

And no, 24 GHz is not in common use. It's used for special applications, mostly highly directional tower-to-tower links (I have one sitting on my roof for a high-bandwidth HAM radio link). With 5G, it will be ubiquitous in an unprecedented way. We've already seen plenty of interference with 5 GHz.

Of course, there's a lot of fearmongering whenever RF radiation is involved, but there are genuine safety concerns.

Source: HAM radio operator

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by torqueTorrent on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @09:31PM (#19678905)
In school, we used to learn about the RF service technicians returning with stories of dead birds and other such phantasmagoria in and around the sweet spots of the feedhorn, antenna, transmission line, transmitter or other such sensitive areas of high power microwave operations.

Professor also admonished us that such technicians must always be infinitely certain that the transmitter is not operational at the time of service.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by adsfqwop on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:10AM (#19680686)
> Professor also admonished us that such technicians must always be infinitely certain that the transmitter is not operational at the time of service.

It's a good thing your professor is not a tower technician. No self respecting technician climbs up a tower without knowing his potential exposure.

There is a reason both the US FCC and EU ICNIRP have guidelines for human exposure, and if you are a tower technician you wear a personal RF densitometer to ensure you are not exposed above these levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_RF_safety_monitor

"Electromagnetic field densitometers, as used in the cellular phone industry, are referred as "personal RF safety monitors", personal protection monitors (PPM) or RF exposimeters.[1] They form part of the personal protective equipment worn by a person working in areas exposed to radio spectrum radiation."

And even with a densitometer, when working on high-powered live equipment, you also wear a protective suit:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Nardaler...

I hope you forward this information to your professor. Industrial RF radiation is not something you want to play around with.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by cannedslime on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:41AM (#19680802)
I saw a video recently where a guy took a densitometer to a street with 5g in my country, and lets just say that there was plenty of sweet spots where it was well over 500uw/m2. Im no expert or anything, but seems like allowing 4 different vendors to put up 5g infrastructure all over the place might not be such a great idea.
Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by throwaway995669 on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @12:00PM (#19683721)
I lived in a place where they had many co-located LTE base stations and power density about 1/4 mi away from these exceeded 75 mW/m^2. Now, I get it that a typical wifi base station transmits up to 500mW, but that's a point source and the inverse square law works to your advantage - the total dose in any one direction is minimal.

Not so when it's a huge multi-tier tower - that's your whole body facing the tower getting that dose.

I'm a software engineer, a technologist, by trade and I was in complete denial about this until I started getting serious eczema that only went away when I stopped using wireless gadgets and avoided staying too long in areas with cellular base stations.

I denied and denied and denied but repeated experiments on myself only revealed how my body reacts to this stuff. My ideal power density is less than 1mW/m^2 to not break out. And there seems to be a relationship to what LTE bands the tower is transmitting on - outside the US I seem to do better. It could be the frequency, or could be the modulation.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by torqueTorrent on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @07:31AM (#19681583)
hmm your comment makes it sound as if I had said that my professor recommended reckless abandon such that we should climb the tower in swimwear during a heavy rain after cranking the tranmitter to maximum?
Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by adsfqwop on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @07:59AM (#19681741)
Yes it's true. Unfortunately I cannot edit my comment any more. I do apologize, as it seems I actually misinterpreted your comment.

You can erase all references to your professor and swimwear tower climbing from the text. Hats off to him! And again, sorry for the mistake.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by torqueTorrent on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @08:20AM (#19681859)
No worries, I reckoned that a misunderstanding must have occurred!

Still, I couldn't resist a vision not unlike the penultimate and electrifying golf scene with Bill Murray & the bishop in Caddyshack.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by idoescompooters on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @10:37AM (#19682938)
I believe these "sweet spots" are technically referred to as "modes". Think of them as "balls" of RF located in a specific area.
Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by xxpor on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @04:12PM (#19676878)
>Nope, they wouldn't. The standing wave would break down as soon as it left the enclosure. It would still be a potentially harmful amount of radiation, but not like that.

Yeah that's a good point

>And no, 24 GHz is not in common use. It's used for special applications, mostly highly directional tower-to-tower links (I have one sitting on my roof for a high-bandwidth HAM radio link).

That's what I mean by common use. Omnidirectional antennas aren't in common use.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by throwaway995669 on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:23PM (#19676007)
Non-ionizing radiation does have potential biological effects on Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels (VGCCs) which our cells have plenty of:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by CamperBob2 on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @02:01PM (#19684921)
Not when immersed in a giant bag of salt water.
Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by cuonic on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @06:34PM (#19677912)
> See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

But microwave links are P2P and directional, using narrow beams at a certain height so that humans (or other objects) don't get in the way. That will not be the case with 5G.

Re:5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk by dicknuckle on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:28PM (#19679215)
microwave is a broad term. WiFi in your house is in the microwave band. microwave CAN be directional and focused, but doesn't have to be.