RF Radiation Protests: Pictures of TEH STOOPID
March 26th, 2008
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Here’s a few pictures I found of protests of cell phone towers, wifi and wireless communications in general. I won’t comment much more, because this is just making me want to bang my head on the wall with frustration. However, these are not as rare as you might think. A simple search on the net found literally dozens if not hundreds of communities in Europe and North America with have had protests, petitions and demonstrations against various wireless systems. A few organizations claim that they have successfully stopped various plans for wireless networks and phone company towers.
Complaining that phone towers are unsitely is one thing. There’s actually some legitimacy to that argument, especially in areas which are known for scenery. However, there’s usually a way around this. In recent times, phone companies have been looking to deploy their networks less noticeably by using existing structures in place of antenna masts. Tall buildings, water towers, old smoke stacks and so on have been used and on occasion antennas have even been designed to look like trees and blend into a forested area.
These protests are not about that though. They’re all about the supposed danger of radiation.
Protests in the UK:
In The United States:
In Canada:
Sources of the images:
(for those who do not know, Tetra is a system for radio communications used by emergency services, police and government. It has become popular in many European countries and elsewhere. Tetra uses a combination of point-to-point radios and infrastructure towers to provide cell phone-like capabilities to the system. It’s very similar to a lot of other “trunked” policy radio systems and not that much different from the system used by Nextel for combined telephony and push-to-talk functionality)
Pro-Stupid Organizations:
EMF Canada
The Tetra Offensive
Tetra Watch
Oatley Park Defenders
San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union
The EMR Network
News Items:
Mike Weatherly Picture Gallery
Story in the Berkley Connector
Palo Alto Daily News Story
Some idiot who went to a protest
No I didn’t have permission to reproduce these. If you happen to own the rights to one of these images, well then get the hell away from the computer monitor before it kills you!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Not Even Wrong, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 26th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Amazing, isn’t it. There are a bunch of things you see again and again. One is that it’s for the children. The other thing is that there’s a moral message about the “risk” and the whole “We don’t know the risk why risk it.” Then the money thing. It’s always about money.
What about the towns which do it to try to stimulate downtown life? What about, as you mention, Tetra which is used by police and emergency to communicate? I bet in these cases they’ll say someone is profiting and then claim the companies that make the radios or the routers or install them are to fault. There’s always someone who profits so it’s always evil, right?
it’s sickening how they use children and tell them they’re doing it for their own health. Children trust what their parents say. Look at that ridiculous picture of the kid with the “creepy radiation disease” sign. Look behind him. He’s there looking like an idiot in his tinfoil hat and a bunch of adults with suits stand behind him chatting about how well the protest is doing.
The skeletons too: All obvious scare/shock/fear tactics.
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March 26th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Tetra is “Terrestrial Trunked” and then there’s Tetrapol which is a newer version of it. It is a fully digital trunked radio system, but it’s really nice because it’s like a combination of a traditional police or fire radio system and a cell phone system. There are towers for dispatch and cells, but radios can also talk point-to-point. The infrastructure allows units to make calls onto the phone network if needed and also to call dispatch and transmit and receive data like images and text reports.
It is very reliable too and is resistant to infrastructure failure because the radios can fall back on point-to-point or use mesh and repeater operation. It also can work on different frequency ranges and relay or fall back on them which makes it resistant to interference or jamming. Some units integrate cellular operation too, which means if they are out of the infrastructure service area or they can’t connect to it they can use the civillian cellular telephone system instead and connect the same.
It’s a very well laid out and controlled system and because of this a bunch of European countries are working to make it the standard for government and emergency services use. it would obviously be to the advantage to have all localities using the same technology so they can talk to eachother if need be.
It has gotten tremendous resistance because it means new towers going up. A lot of claims of EM health problems.
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I can see the lack of comment or deeper explanation of the pictures. As I look at them I am restraining myself from using a lot of vulgar language to describe them.
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Would somebody please explain the inverse square law of radiation to these idiots.
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
DV82XL said:
Actually I think a point can be made here. More towers can mean less radiation exposure. How? because considering the inverse square law, the radiation from the tower is nothing compared to the radiation from the phone. It’s so much closer so more radiation.
The further the tower and the less line of sight you have the worse the connection. The phone therefore is going to need to broadcast a stronger signal. This is why the batteries run down faster in poor coverage areas. If you are in good coverage the phone might only be 100mw, but if it’s bad it has to up the transmission to like 400mw. Since the phone is physically so much closer, this is the bigger concern. Therefore: more exposure.
Plus, if you have more towers, each one is going to need to be less powerful. Therefore, less exposure near the tower because it’s more spread out. And also, more towers means they can be less tall because each has to cover less area and needs less line of sight. Lots of towers = short towers. If they’re short you can hide them easily in billboards and roofs and water towers and stuff. Less unsightly.
if you worry less about the rf exposure you can tackle the unsightliness. If you allow a tower anywhere then you can pick the best locations. Would you rather have it in a church steeple or a water tower that happens to be next to a school? Take that option away and the tower will be way more unsightly if there happens to be no suitable structure nearby. Keep all areas open and you find better places to keep them lower profile.
Therefore: If you are worried that towers for cell phones ruin the view and change the landscape. If you worry about rf radiation. if you worry about police and fire being able to have good communications. If you worry about economics.
Any of these are actually opposed and damaged by these protests!
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March 26th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Yeah actually the whole thing about unsightliness is not really a thing they even care about. It’s usually no big deal to have a phone tower. Maybe if it were in an area with a lot of tourism and famous sweeping vistas, but normally they are next to a highway anyway. Who cares? Of course, wifi generally doesn’t have towers anyway and a lot of cell phone transmitters as mentioned are just on roofs or something anyway.
Part of the issue is with this is the idea of allowing phone towers on public property or school property. That is what gets people to go nuts.
I can’t imagine anything I’d want the local school to do more than sign an agreement for a cell tower. They are constantly complaining about funding. They could make a decent amount of extra income on the lease agreement.
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March 26th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Poor kids. Some look too young to read the signs they are made to carry.
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March 27th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Not to get all chauvenistic or nothing, but it appears the UK protests are only paranoid FUD, whereas the North American protests are full blown stupidity both in the USA and Canada. I mean “Hell no we won’t glow”? Do they understand what they’re saying?
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March 27th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Doctor Robotnik said:
No kidding. The church on my street has a tall square bell tower which dominates the area, It is now populated with all sorts of equipment, and I understand the rents are now the major source of income for that parish.
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:17 am
How on earth can you say that more cell towers or making them closer to people is going to make less radiation? That’s stupid. Nobody is as worried about phones because which is worse: a little phone or a bit tower bathing your area in radiation that is more powerful. Phones are a danger too, but there is less problem because they’re not always on plus it’s personal choice. If you want to do that fine, but a tower is subjecting us all to it.
Plus I looked up the square law you said and it only proves it more. it says that if you go away from the tower then radiation is reduced and close up is very very high. So this proves location is what matters. If you need to have antennas fine but put them away from where anyone lives and definately not near a school. If you put it next to a playground then your inverse square law proves that’s criminal because if it were further then the kids would be okay.
We’re going to build more towers near schools and that’ll be for less radiation? Do you think i’m stupid?
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:33 am
First photo, upper left corner: what’s with the “No to O2″ sign? These folks seem to have already suffered from severe enough O2 deprivation to have resulted in brain damage . . . .
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Yes, but O2 is also a wireless phone network.
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:41 am
The inverse square law states that the radiative flux is reduced by the square of the distance from the radiator. Thus top provide a usable about of power over a given service area the power output must be increased by the power of two every time you double the distance.
If cellphone base stations were placed on every corner then the power they would have to use tho provide coverage to the next corner would be very small compared to the amount of power that would be require for a tower far away to do the same thing. That’s why more are better: because they would transmit less power overall.
And yes as a matter of fact, I do think you are stupid.
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Actually you do get radiation from a cell phone all the time because of the fact that it needs to report to the tower constantly. Even when it’s idle it needs to keep pinging so that the network can find it if there is a call it can receive it. An idle phone therefore transmits a radio signal too, although not as much.
Wireless phones have a variable transmission power depending on how much is needed. If the signal quality is poor then both the transmitter on the phone and in the tower need to up their power to get a connection. A handheld phone might have a power of 400 miliwatts but it only uses this if necessary. If the connection is good it can get by with a lot less. Possibly 100 mw. This is why the battery wears out fast when the reception is touchy and less when the reception is good.
So good reception means less power output. Phones are a lot more exposure, even if it’s just someone right next to you because the proximitry is so close.
So yes, more towers = better reception = less power needed = less exposure. No doubt about it.
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March 27th, 2008 at 11:40 am
RBR1978 said:
Oh, the irony of it.
And while we’re about it, the phone companies should start a child abuse awareness campaign – and the first targets should be the morons who set their children up to be used and abused by the anti-EMF lunatics.
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March 27th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I met one of those lunatics who thinks that the ignition system EMF from gas powered cars gives her headaches. Now she drives a Prius and says when on electric only she does not feel it. Never mind that the ignition current (HT) is only a few hundred mA, electrically and magnetically shielded by the firewall and hood. While on electric drive 300-400 Amps, chopped up with relatively high frequency, are flowing directly past her hip in the center tunnel from the batteries in the back.
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March 28th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Dear Kevin 22,
Since you ask, yes, I do think you’re stupid. You’re an ignorant, closed-minded, gormless moron. I suspect your only excuse could be that you don’t understand the very basic science because you can’t read it.
Best regards, etc…
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March 28th, 2008 at 8:20 am
RBR1978 said:
What you are talking about is something which seems to be counter-intuitive on first glance. Being closer to a tower means less radiation?
It isn’t complicated though. When you think: Yes, because then everyone’s phone needs to pump out less power to connect to said tower then you end up with less nearby transmitters with high power.
It seems some people do not want to go even the slightest bit into things beyond the first knee-jerk reaction and actually THINK about it for a second. Even worse: LEARN something new
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March 28th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I thought this was bad. But then I saw the video. Just wow.
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March 30th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Josh said:
Oh I’m sure we can find some UK protesters who are as bad or worse as the USA ones. Don’t get too ****y there. We all know that deep down your country is as stupid as we are.
(well maybe not quite as stupid, but every country seems to have its fair share these days)
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March 30th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Josh said:
Check out some of today’s offerings from the British press:
Mobile phones ‘more dangerous than smoking’, The Independent
and
Cordless home phones sparks radiation fear, Daily Mail
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April 6th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
There is also the fact the the amount of radiation is tiny you get more radiation from flying in plane or being at high altitude then you do from any of these sources. For example commercial airline pilots get more radiation a year then a worker at a nuclear plant. Yet people fly all the time and don’t have any health problems. The problem is people have no idea how radiation works.
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