RF impacts

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Joined 2020
You know what's crazy. That most people believe that putting an 'more or less' invisible gas into the atmosphere has huge consequences. Meanwhile the same people believe that putting invisible energy into the atmosphere has no major consequences. And are quick to dismiss any idea that bugs or humans are impacted by RF just because "it isn't categorized as ionizing"... If RF can ionize gases and make the electrons jump energy levels, Imagine what that would do to the atoms in you. Also the fact that nerves are basically electronic sensors.
I seriously doubt all that RF pollution isn't having an effect on life. Imagine living with a ~1W microwave pointed at your face, that would be a wifi modem.
with 5GHz wifi and the 5G broadband it would be ~ 4x as energetic per watt that a microwave/2.4ghz wifi is.
So then at the worst case scenario you could be having the equivalent of 1/100th of a microwave pointed at you for your entire life.
 
Various thoughts,

As also a ham radio operator I/You have to be careful about how much RF you put out and are exposed to when operating. There are new criteria out there - (maybe by the FCC) which list maximum exposures as a function of output power, frequency and exposure time.

Another thought is their effects on your HiFi system. In most urban settings, your listening room is bombarded with all kinds of EMI / RFI / what have you. And this "stuff" can get into your system and cause who knows what kind of AUDIBLE havoc. I firmly believe that a LOT of the "crazy"?? tweaks out there do something to mitigate this stuff, like shunting or absorbing something.
 
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A microwave oven has MORE of an effect per watt than other frequencies do. Water absorbs 2.45 GHz and turns it into heat quite readily. The food heats up more than the plate, right? But the plate still heats up. The rest of the spectrum still has effect. On water, or any other dielectric it will run into. Even 60 Hz, where you are often in the nearfield, even if you’re 100 feet from the power line. Does it cause cancer? I’m sure it does, in individuals whose systems are particularly sensitive. And to others it doesn’t do a damn thing. It’s called evolution. Everything in the environment affects it, including all this technology.

If you are afraid of it, you just have to turn everything off. I’m personally more worried about people’s brains being scrambled by the garbage information being spread over the internet than from the heating effect of the wi-fi router supplying that information. I can see a much stronger correlation and much more rapid damage occurring.
 
The maximum power spec for a 2.4 GHz WiFi device is indeed 1 watt. This is specified for "industrial" usage where humans are not typically in the near field. The typical home router runs in the 100 milliwatt and under range. The specs are a bit higher at 5 GHz. Most home routers have a somewhat omnidirectional radiation pattern concentrated on roughly the same plane as the router itself. I have mine sitting on a shelf in the basement at about a foot below the floor of the main level. My main workspace is about 4 feet below that router where there is nearly zero signal. The bedrooms are on the other end of the house where there is barely enough signal for reliable connectivity.

One would be wise NOT to have the router "pointed at your face" especially at close range. Why intentionally expose yourself to an "unknown threat" where the facts are not all completely understood. The three computers in my basement lab that see the most use are all plugged directly into the router and do not have Wifi capability.

I spent 41 years working at Motorola where research on the effects of RF on humans was being done. There was no conclusive evidence for damage, but no evidence that there is none either.
 
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Man, if they figure out how to meter and bill for sunlight they could make a killing at 10c per kWh. Or even cutting it to wholesale rates.

After 10,000 years of everyone wearing sunscreen nobody will be able to venture outside without it. We’ll be like vampires - catching on fire at exposure to sunlight.
 
A microwave oven has MORE of an effect per watt than other frequencies do. Water absorbs 2.45 GHz and turns it into heat quite readily. The food heats up more than the plate, right? But the plate still heats up. The rest of the spectrum still has effect. On water, or any other dielectric it will run into. Even 60 Hz, where you are often in the nearfield, even if you’re 100 feet from the power line. Does it cause cancer? I’m sure it does, in individuals whose systems are particularly sensitive. And to others it doesn’t do a damn thing. It’s called evolution. Everything in the environment affects it, including all this technology.

If you are afraid of it, you just have to turn everything off. I’m personally more worried about people’s brains being scrambled by the garbage information being spread over the internet than from the heating effect of the wi-fi router supplying that information. I can see a much stronger correlation and much more rapid damage occurring.
Well I was thinking more about the ionizing aspect, since the energy would go up in a square law.
There are numerous reports of bad health effects for people living under HV lines.
But of course there's gonna be emense pushback in any research since everyone relies on RF. It would be like researching the health effects of water.
Also on that note... how would someone even research that? would the control group have to live inside a faraday cage?
 
There was no conclusive evidence for damage, but no evidence that there is none either.
In this case very hard to prove a negative. However, a huge proportion of the world has been immersed in cellular, wifi, bluetooth etc for a long time now, and if there was any meaningful impact it would be expected to show in epidemiological studies by now - and people have been looking. Comparing this to a "more or less invisible gas" whose chemical effects are well known and easily measured isn't really relevant.
 
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Also on that note... how would someone even research that? would the control group have to live inside a faraday cage?
Much of the work being done when I was an active RF engineer was done on live animals or parts of human cadavers.

I only know about a tiny fraction of what was done by Dr. Quirino Balzano did during the 26 years he worked in the advanced research group at Motorola in Florida where I worked for 41 years overlapping his time on both ends.

I know that one of our crack security officers demanded to see what was in a large, sealed box marked "biohazard" as it was brought in one night at "lunch time - 7PM" when I worked night shift. Dr. Q told him that it was a human head, but they did not believe him. Inspection resulted in a lot of puke and a passed out security guard. I had heard of some of Dr. Q's experiments and I went the other way before the box was opened.

We designed and manufactured high powered walkie talkies for public safety (police, fire, EMT) use. The typical 4G or 5G cell phone of today produces between 50 and 250 milliwatts of average RF power depending on the information being sent and the distance from the tower it is using. This power is regulated constantly to be at near minimum for the RF path in use. This is done for maximizing the number of data exchanges on a given radio channel at the same time. Voice calls result in the lowest power averaged over time since nothing but control bits are sent during times of silence and digitized voice has a low data rate compared to pictures and video. Transmissions occur on a single radio frequency band from 550 MHz to 4.2 GHz in most cases. The band choice is made when the call is set up and can change during the conversation if the phone is moving. Most of the RF energy is radiated out of the back of the phone near the top, usually away from the user's head. This was not the case with the older analog and early 2G and 3G digital phones.

The typical police walkie talkie will produce between 2 and 6 watts of RF power in a single frequency channel on one of 4 frequency bands from 136 to 941 MHz. This is radiated from the whip antenna on the top of the radio in all directions with the peak radiation coming from the area where the whip meets the top of the radio. The radio is often held in front of the face putting a lot of energy right into the forehead. Many users wear the radio on their belt and use a remote microphone to reduce this exposure.

The most famous experiment was called "Making Bacon." I was asked to modify about a dozen radios for maximum power output and continuous transmission whenever a battery was in place. There were radios ford different frequencies across each of the 4 frequency bands. They were rigged with easily swappable batteries. These radios were strapped to the side of pigs at a pig farm with a lot of other pigs, where they remained until the pigs went to the processing plant. The pigs with radios and a few "control pigs" had their heads removed and "autopsies were performed."

Dr. Q left Motorola in 2001. His replacement was still learning how radios worked when he was murdered (unrelated to work) as Motorola entered a downsizing phase and was not replaced. The RF exposure work at Motorola Florida ended at that time.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/quirino-balzano-a04bb617/
 
In this case very hard to prove a negative. However, a huge proportion of the world has been immersed in cellular, wifi, bluetooth etc for a long time now, and if there was any meaningful impact it would be expected to show in epidemiological studies by now - and people have been looking. Comparing this to a "more or less invisible gas" whose chemical effects are well known and easily measured isn't really relevant.
Well don't tell me you're implying that there hasn't been huge change in global health. For example the plummeting testosterone levels, iirc estrogen levels in women also dropped.
The problem is, what is causing this? RF, Food, Medicine, Pollution? It would be nearly impossible to find a definitive answer since you can't escape RF, You can't escape pollution. It would be very expensive to have a "clean" control food supply that isn't littered with the usual pesticides and whatnot. and in the end... probably all 4 are to blame
 
probably all 4 are to blame
And number 5, kids that spend countles hours every day playing video games or watching YouTube videos while eating junk food and never getting any exercise or even going outside. They will likely grow into unhealthy adults incapable of a serious career.

Speaking of RF, we haven't even mentioned smart power and water meters yet.
 
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Yeah... Have you seen RECESSIM's videos on youtube about those smart meters?
https://inv.nadeko.net/channel/UCVa4o0P6xhhSDi3rgLm2SBw
Absolutely Orwellian how the things with IOT and "Smart Control" are going.

It's no doubt just monitoring everything. In the future they'll probably use it to tax you for doing specific things, like using A/C or a heater, or mining crypto.
There's already an incentivized program in california where you get like 10$ per year if you use a 'special thermostat' that will turn off your a/c in case of 'power events'.
If you can monitor the power, and the load waveform you can have a signature for the A/C so that you don't even need a special thermostat.
It also floods the RF spectrum even more.
 
There's already an incentivized program in california where you get like 10$ per year if you use a 'special thermostat' that will turn off your a/c in case of 'power events'.
We had that in Florida as far back as the 1990's. There was a radio receiver and a relay that went in series with the thermostat. It just shut off the AC when the energy demand was high. I worked the night shift, and was not usually home during the evening meal cooking and afternoon AC running 100% of the time so it didn't matter to me. It was a volunteer program that gave a 5% discount off the total electric bill.
 
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Came across this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-the-man-your-father-was

"The most prominent, a 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, revealed a “substantial” drop in U.S. men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s, with average levels declining by about 1% per year. This means, for example, that a 60-year-old man in 2004 had testosterone levels 17% lower than those of a 60-year-old in 1987. Another study of Danish men produced similar findings, with double-digit declines among men born in the 1960s compared to those born in the 1920s."

20s - 60s could be all the military radar.

A very crude chart roughly glued together from those 2 study results:
The interpolation between the square and the diamond data points is a guess
bad chard.jpg
 
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For example the plummeting testosterone levels, iirc estrogen levels in women also dropped.
The problem is, what is causing this? RF, Food, Medicine, Pollution? It would be nearly impossible to find a definitive answer since you can't escape RF, You can't escape pollution. It would be very expensive to have a "clean" control food supply that isn't littered with the usual pesticides and whatnot. and in the end... probably all 4 are to blame
The cause of plummeting testosterone level is already known. Bad diet leading to overweightness, overuse of computer and internet which leads to physical inactivity and increased use of plastic in food and drinks (BPA - even if it says BPA Free).
 
I've had my ticket since I was a kid - 52 years of RF exposure, mostly HF less than 1000 watts, but also VHF and I guess microwave if you count stuff like airborne transponders.

I don't worry about HF at all. My rule of thumb with VHF has always been to use the lowest power that works, and keep the antenna as far away from my head as practical.

I keep a cell phone at a couple of feet distance when I'm not using it.

Distance is your friend. RF field strength drops fast. Caution around RF is sensible, but I live my life without worrying about it.

Win W5JAG
 
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