Upcoming 5G mobile network controversy

Well since I'm a RF engineer.. I didn't watch the videos but I know the arguments all too well and when folks hear that I deal with RF, they typically ask my opinion on the matter, and usually get pissy when I give it to them.

Hint: People ask for the truth, but can't handle the truth because they really just want juicy conspiracy. Truth is boring. Facts are boring. Neither of which give you something to vent about and seem emotionally invested to others.


There's one thing that folks fail to note.. I hear people use the argument "the radiation from these towers" all the time. The use of the term "radiation" is a misnomer when used in most of these arguments because they expect there are foreign/subatomic particles streaming from these tower emitters.

This isn't particle emitting "radiation" like nuclear radiation. There are no neutrons, electrons, atom cores or gamma photons shooting out. And YES, there are tons of folks who believe this to be TRUE.

The "emission" is stimulating the surrounding air to propagate a waveform, just like audio, but at much, much higher frequency. And much like audio, a lot of these systems use a technology called "waveguides" which are actually acoustic chambers and pipes to carry the signal. YES, they are hollow and YES a lot of the antennas are more like acoustical horns (waveguides) like you see on tweeters. Why? Because they work at higher powers that can't be easily dealt with on circuitboards, and the signal power losses over frequency through cabling are too great to use normal cables. You have less loss through the air at medium distances, so they use hollow conduits to get the signals from the machine rooms up to the tower transceivers, just like your ear canal pipes the sound from your outer ear to your eardrum.

But the funny thing is all the soccer moms complaining at the local town hall about the new tower on their street don't realize that the "safest" place is actually closer to the tower, not further.  The emitter beams are, of course, the width of the emitter face and then spread out with distance.  If you're under the tower, you're usually outside of the beam and are only receiving incidental signal.

You have two components of a signal itself that are significant factors in what people consider to be harmful..

Frequency and power.

The frequency of cell signals, including the upcoming 5G is already filled with with existing radio emissions. See the chart I linked below to be ASTOUNDED by the amount of radio signals already present in the air that you probably had no idea were actually there..

The first 5G band is in the 3.5GHz range. Band 2 is in the 20GHz-300GHz range. This puts it between existing cell frequencies of around 2.4GHz, microwave ovens at around 2.42GHz and the very bottom of infrared light at around 300GHz.

So if you think 5G will cause cancers due to frequency, then I have some bad news about infrared light and microwave ovens..  But fear not, the penetration ability of a waveform or particle drops drastically as you go up in frequency if you don't consider power. 

(BTW, look up perytons)

Next is POWER. How much power are we talking?

Well, nobody really knows what the optimal power output for 5G is yet since a real-world application criteria is not defined. 5G uses a new technology called MIMO which in layman's terms means that it's electrically directional. They use a panel of smaller antennas and adjust phase relationships between all the antennas to "steer" the signal towards the cell phone so that it's more focused rather than just beaming out everywhere. That makes a HUGE difference in how you measure power output, but 5G frequencies also mean that the signal travels a much shorter distance and does not propagate around corners or through barriers like walls, so they'll need a lot more stations to fill in the gaps.

But to generalize, most stations are starting up around 30-40dBm which in real-world numbers is about 20W of power directly in front of the transmitter.

That's it. 20 watts. The computer screen you're staring at is outputting about that towards your eyeballs. Now you have eye cancer to go with your brain cancer that your cell phone gave you. /sacrasm..

Your cell right now can output about 1W at peak, but generally around 200mW. 200mW right up next to your skin at around 2.4GHz equals a depth up to around 1mm. The dead skin layer on your epidermis is slightly less than that. They also figured that a full power transmitter would raise the skin temperature about 1 degree Kelvin.

Considering you're getting broadband radiation (in these frequencies, mind you) from the sun at around 500W/M^2, kinda seems inconsequential, doesn't it?


Most of the studies on frequencies and power have fatal flaws. Most use monotonic carrier waveforms, not highly modulated signals which spread power across wider frequencies and greatly lessen the impact at a single point (much like you focus the sun through a lens to start a fire). Most also use much higher than average powers and crest factors in order to actually elicit biologic responses in order to measure "something".



upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_States_Frequency_Allocations_Chart_2016_-_The_Radio_Spectrum.pdf

lol radio waves are gonna kill us alllll!!


RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!




ridiculous.

Great read svart enjoyed that.

Im a Ham radio operator, so I know a little about radio waves and things. It is hilarious how much RF there is in the world that people just don't know about and blame random shit on. Funny stuff.

People have a habit of blaming their own problems on things they can't control, with the benefit of knowing there isn't much they can do about those things. It absolves them of responsibility to find solutions to their own problems and gives them things to virtue signal over.

Unfortunately it's usually based on ignorance on their part, as well as the ignorance of those around them.

Why? 

RF is not radiation..

There's probably a higher risk of getting skin cancer just from the sun than from a microwave. 

The military has experimented with area denial via infrasound and ultrasound, etc.  The problem is that the power required for infrasound is too great to be feasable and ultrasound loses too much energy through the air to be useful more than a few hundred feet.

And yes, there are RF detectors, called spectrum analyzers and RF power meters.

I'm unsure of what you mean..

Microwave ovens excite water molecules by vibrating them with waves of large amounts of power, like 1000W or more by bombarding them with photons.  it's a fundamentally different concept than e-mag emissions from telecommunications. 


Also, unlike popular misconceptions, the food does not cook from the inside out, it cooks from the outside inwards because the photons cannot penetrate more than a few millimeters even at such high power levels.  It's the constant application of this power that results in heating of the external water molecules that transfers that heat inwards to the core of the food.  

The frequency, 2.42-2.45GHz (for consumer level microwaves) and 915MHz (for commercial microwaves) were simply chosen because at the time of the conception of the microwave oven (in the 1940's) these were open frequency bands that were not being utilized.  

These discussions get murky because words like “radiation” are pretty broad terms. In a general sense, tons of things are radiation. The heat coming from your furnace is radiation. It’s thermal energy “radiating” from your ducts. It’s radiant heat.

When people speak of the harms of radiation however, they’re talking (knowingly or unknowingly) about ionizing radiation. Which is electromagnetic (or nuclear/sub atomic) radiation that has the strength to disrupt electrons and/or nuclei of atoms. This is the harmful radiation that causes sickness, cancer etc.

As to exposure, It’s commonly said that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation exposure...however that too is a misconception. Harmful exposure is a factor of 1) strength of exposure 2) length of time of exposure and 3) frequency of exposure (as in how many times you’ve been exposed).

What would surprise most people to learn is that everyday were exposed to naturally occurring ionizing radiation. Some of it is background radiation coming from cosmic X-rays bombarding our planet. Some of it comes from minerals and heavy metals in the soil, like argon that is off put from granite. Ever take a swim in a natural hot springs? Guess what...more radiation! Mostly this is all harmless though and doesn’t decrease your life expectancy any more than breathing polluted air, or drinking tap water etc.

This website will put a lot of people at ease: 
www.radiationnetwork.com/index.htm
www.radiationnetwork.com/DetailMaps.htm

If you check in for a few weeks, it gets boring fast. 

We shouldn't ever have to worry about this, but in our lifetime or our children's lifetime, there's enough idiots doing stuff in secret.. 

The military already has a lot of communications networking of it's own.  It doesn't need 5G.  A large majority of satellites in orbit are government-only communications satellites..  A lot of their fiber backbone is completely separate and redundant to the consumer backbone.  I used to work for Bellsouth many years ago and I'll tell you, there are some eye-opening things going on in government communications that the public has NO idea about and is probably happier not knowing.

5G and a lot of existing comms protocols have the ability to capture data on multi-path delays in MIMO.  As the transmitter and receiver handshake, the transmitter will scan for greatest signal strength to steer the signal towards the receiver.  During this time you could theoretically capture a lot of data on delay times which could work out to rough estimates of distances to objects that produce phased reflections, AKA: produce a rough sonar image.

But it's already being done. 

Your WIFI routers with the bundle of 4-or-more antennas on top?  Those antennas are a phased array that steer the signals just like 5G will.  In fact, there are concerns that hackers are already using the routers for mapping, etc.

Even with ionizing radiation (the types from nuclear fission), you can take quite a bit without ever having an issue.  The less powerful radiations like Alpha and Beta radiation can barely penetrate the skin.  Simply washing and lightly scrubbing your skin can cleanse yourself from the particles. 


It's when they get places you can't clean, like your lungs when you breathe in radioactive dusts, that they do their damage by radiating the surrounding soft tissues over time and causing random DNA damage.  

Most cells just die when their DNA is broken through radiation, but some have their DNA broken in ways that don't kill the cell outright and they can sometimes divide into multiple cells that have no control over their replication, resulting in cancers.

Higher power radiation types like Xrays and Gamma are able to zip right through your body and can damage much higher numbers of cells just from external exposure.  

The issue with broad statements about lifetime exposure is that generally there is no clear delineation between tolerable amounts of low-level exposure and untolerable amounts.  It's very different from person to person, and exposure situation.

A person who is exposed to higher levels for shorter periods is generally less likely to develop cancers because the higher radiation doses tend to kill the cells outright.  However, it depends greatly on the type of radiation, the location of exposure, etc.

If you want a laugh though, go check out the "banana equivalent dose"..

Also, if anyone wants to get a better understanding of this stuff, stay out of the conspiracy theory echo chambers and just grab a physics book. Get an old edition that’s dirt cheap and start reading about waves. You can’t really understand it unless you start at the bottom (in my experience anyway). If the math is confusing, get going on Khan academy. I’m totally serious. Real knowledge about this stuff is there for the taking but you’ll have to earn it.

I’m a long, long ways from an expert but I’m far enough along now to know that you can’t really ‘casually’ understand this stuff.