Going for just the underwear would get rather uncomfortable.  That’s why I wear an all encompassing Faraday Cage bodysuit.  Comfortable, protective, and sane!

Plus, that full body cage… oh the capacitance it has… oh the charge it can build… oh baby that electric spark it’ll give your lover when you first greet them with a kiss!  It’s a sure winner, and I’ll bet it looks cool too! 

You’re damn right it looks cool.  Unfortunately though, my sparks are nothing compared to Jade’s.  She managed to cobble together some sort of horrific Van de Graaff/Tesla Coil monstrosity for her suit.  Those lightning bolts hurt.

I was the recipient of TMS (Transcranial magnetic stimulation) since 1 October 2010 to treat PTSD following a car accident.  I had MRI scan done on 1 October as part of TMS trial - it was clear. I was healthy otherwise, very fit, never sick.
On 1 April 2011 I was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme Grade 4, the deadliest form of brain cancer. I had my operation (resection of left parietal lobe) and just finished my radio and chemo (first stage) treatment.
I know that TMS has been declared completely SAFE around the world, probably thanks to powerful lobbying by psychiatrists or whoever is supporting this invasive treatment for psychological problems (lobotomy would have been safer, I think).  I sincerely believe that TMS caused my brain cancer. Please contact me with your thoughts and comments. I note that there are engineers in this forum. I am a neurolinguist and speech therapist. I am interested in the relationship between magnetic stimulation and other forms of magnetic radiation. I am looking at TMS protocals currently. SHould I start a new Topic to include cellphone radiation and other types of radiation, including magnetic? Look forward to your comments. Thanks.

I don’t know if anyone here is knowledgeable enough about this to discuss it.  Let’s leave your post here for the moment, and if more people respond we can give it it’s own thread.

Occam

I’m sad to hear about your psychological trauma and brain tumor, Wanda.  I hope that you can recover, again.  I am an engineer, and engineers are not medically qualified, so I can’t give you certain answers.  But what convinced you that the TMS caused the brain tumor, was it just the timing of the two? 

People today, in industrialized countries, have lived their whole lives immersed in Electro-magnetic energy such as AM/FM/Television signals, with all that exposure we’ve seen no large outbrakes of cancer in the industrialized world.  Like I said I can’t give you a certain answer, but I do hope that helps you to clarify the puzzle you want to solve.

As JITP points out, we are immersed in electro-magnetic radiation.  However, there are also many other factors.  We are exposed to a wide variety of chemicals that weren’t around earlier, our life spans have increased, we are connect with many more people, especially those who came from different parts of the world, we have a wider variety of foods available, plants and insects are accidentally spread across the globe, etc. 

Because of these myriad changes, it’s difficult for us to show that any particular one was the cause of any given effect without a great deal of testing and research.

Occam

Hello everyone! Hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been busy as a bee but I’m now making an effort to check in once in a while. 

I have a question for all you techie people about cell phone towers. I’ve heard people petitioning to get them out of their neighborhood and out of their church steeples. I always scoffed at that as nonsense - how could something way up high effect someone a few houses down the street?

Well now a cellular tower antenna is being installed six feet above my head. Literally. I’m in a high-rise in one of a handful of penthouse condos on the top floor, and our board voted to lease our roof to a cellular company.

In an effort to learn more, I looked up info from the government and the cancer society. It says people on the ground have nothing to worry about because the waves dissipate by the time they reach the ground. But I’m not on the ground, I’m a few feet under the roof. I imagine the roof itself would block most “emissions” from the device. Most concerns I saw noted online were for the workman who repaired the towers rather than residents around them.

Are there any other health effects people are concerned about? Would home electronics continue to work normally or would the tower interfere with say, wireless devices? I know the government would not allow the device to be installed on a residential property if there were going to be immediate effects. I know nothing about the way those radio frequencies work, really it’s rather sad. But I guess if my cell phone gets better reception at home I’m all for it - ha ha.

The neighbors (and not just the ones on the top floor, people throughout the building) are huffing about cancer and seasickness, and other health issues that “will surely come when the device is switched on.”

Personally I’m more worried about the unit causing roof leaks (will the phone company caulk properly when they bolt the antenna in? They’d better!!!) But I want to be armed and ready to have rational discussions with the neighbors when they express concerns. I’m hoping I will be able to alleviate some concerns.

There has never been any evidence that non-ionizing radiation has any ill health effects upon living organisms other than the possibility of heating them up. Basically, if it’s a radio wave of any kind, the worst it can do is generate some heat inside your body. This can be serious if we’re talking about a huge powerful microwave antenna—it’s basically an open microwave oven. So yes, if you get exposed to that much radiation, it can cook you—but you’ll notice the effect immediately! If you don’t feel the heat, then you’re not getting cooked. (There is a very special exception for large amounts of infrared light entering the eyeball and overheating the retina, which doesn’t cool readily, but it would not apply to the radio waves from a cell phone tower.)

The common way that radiation hurts living organisms is by ionizing molecules, but that requires high-powered radiation: ultraviolet or higher. Cell phone towers don’t come anywhere near those extremely high frequencies.

As for radio interference, that is certainly a possibility. Modern equipment is extremely sensitive, so it can readily be affected by the higher energy fluxes close to an antenna. Particularly troubling are “sideband” problems. The cell tower is radiating energy at its defined frequencies, but it will also emit small amounts of radiation at nearby frequencies outside of its assigned range. This can affect communications devices in nearby bands. I don’t recall what spectrum is near to the cell phone bands, but that spectrum could be disrupted very close to the antenna. The FCC is pretty careful about allocating spectrum in such a way that sideband problems between different bands are minimized. However, there are always extreme cases where additional measures must be taken. I would guess that you would in fact experience some difficulties with some devices, in which case you’d have to complain so that they would have to install a metal shield between you and the tower. It is standard practice to install shielding in special cases like this, but sometimes the installer will claim that, because the antenna concentrates most of its energy along the horizontal plane, there’s no chance that it could be affecting you. What the installer doesn’t mention is that the energy from the antenna could be bouncing off a nearby object and back into your house through the walls.

This all gets very complicated and very difficult to prove. The best way for the building owner to demonstrate good faith is for them to pay for measurements of RF flux at many points throughout the building before and after initiation of operation of the antenna. That way you can have quantitative results that everybody can rely on. Moreover, the actual measurements will probably put your health fears to rest. Once you learn, for example, that the RF energy flux in your living space is, oh, say, 10 microwatts per square meter (and recall that a microwave oven is pushing maybe 1,000 watts per square meter), you get some perspective on the issue. (By the way, I’m making up those numbers; they represent wild guesses on my part about the actual figures.)

One last detail: if you really think that the antenna is causing problems, your best way of proving it is to carry out a diurnal cycle test. Find some way of measuring the magnitude of the problem: does your television image suddenly go bad? Does your bluetooth keyboard miss keystrokes? Are you receiving instructions from God through your dental fillings? If you can show that such events happen more frequently during “prime phoning time” (roughly 9:00 AM through 9:00 PM) than during “quiet time”, then you have something solid to show. But that might take a lot of effort.

Oh, and one MORE detail: I believe that the basic FCC rule is simple: if Party A’s equipment is causing Party B’s equipment to mess up, then it’s Party A’s responsibility to fix the problem, not Party B’s. There are, I’m sure, exceptions, but this is the basic rule they’ve relied on for decades.

One thing you may want to demand is that they cover the roof with a layer of aluminum foil then tar over it so that the radiation immediately above would be blocked in your direction. 

And welcome back, Jules.  We’ve missed you.

Occam

Chris, thank you for your very detailed reply! Very helpful for this “non-techie.”

Occam, I was considering handing out tin-foil hats at the condo board meeting.

Chris outlined what I understand of such radiation better than I could. The gist of it is that it is not dangerous to you (unless you constantly feel like turning on the A/C even when it’s cold, and then it could actually be a perk, saving your A/C bill) only potentially to your electronic equipment.

Jules - 17 September 2011 01:23 PM

Hello everyone! Hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been busy as a bee but I’m now making an effort to check in once in a while. 

I have a question for all you techie people about cell phone towers. I’ve heard people petitioning to get them out of their neighborhood and out of their church steeples. I always scoffed at that as nonsense - how could something way up high effect someone a few houses down the street?

Well now a cellular tower antenna is being installed six feet above my head. Literally. I’m in a high-rise in one of a handful of penthouse condos on the top floor, and our board voted to lease our roof to a cellular company.

In an effort to learn more, I looked up info from the government and the cancer society. It says people on the ground have nothing to worry about because the waves dissipate by the time they reach the ground. But I’m not on the ground, I’m a few feet under the roof. I imagine the roof itself would block most “emissions” from the device. Most concerns I saw noted online were for the workman who repaired the towers rather than residents around them.

Are there any other health effects people are concerned about? Would home electronics continue to work normally or would the tower interfere with say, wireless devices? I know the government would not allow the device to be installed on a residential property if there were going to be immediate effects. I know nothing about the way those radio frequencies work, really it’s rather sad. But I guess if my cell phone gets better reception at home I’m all for it - ha ha.

The neighbors (and not just the ones on the top floor, people throughout the building) are huffing about cancer and seasickness, and other health issues that “will surely come when the device is switched on.”

Personally I’m more worried about the unit causing roof leaks (will the phone company caulk properly when they bolt the antenna in? They’d better!!!) But I want to be armed and ready to have rational discussions with the neighbors when they express concerns. I’m hoping I will be able to alleviate some concerns.

Jules—I’ve merged your thread into this older discussion of the same issues. Nothing has changed since then.

I do not know anything about medicine. 

But I am electrical engineer.  You will be exposed to an electric field, this is normal.  But the transceiver antenna in not at a normal power level.  So consider yourself as risky as a electrical worker is, you are at higher risk so you should take precautions.  The electric field will move electrons through a conductors like metal, water with a electrolyte dissolved in it, or acid.  You are water with a electrolytes and acids, the electrons will move in you.  As they move from one atom to the next, the atom does not care which electron it has, it just cares how many it has, one electron is as good as the next for chemistry to work.  So when the electrons move they don’t move freely, they push against resistance, and so cause heat.  Like any heat source, if you feel hot, then move away, moving away works.  You will not be shocked by the field, don’t play with the antenna cables or wave guides.

If your building board wants a transceiver antenna for the money, then let them spend some money to shield below the antenna, and insulate below the antenna.  Shielding is simply a sheet of metal, aluminum is nice, but ground that metal with a ground wire will make it much better.  The ground wire is the third wire that almost no-one has in their home.  Shielding over your apartment would protect you and the apartments below also, so it affects more people than just you in a good way.  No-one has added the ground wire because if they don’t route it outside their walls, and can’t snake it through their wall then they have to tear up their walls.  For you Jules, add the ground wire to your building.  It must go from the roof shielding, all the way down to the ground. 

You can check if you have one, turn off the switch/breaker/fuse for an outlet with three prongs, unscrew and pull the outlet out and see if you have three wires, or just two, the third would probably be a bare copper wire (the green screw)  and probably isn’t there.  The ground wire is not the neutral wire (the aluminum, silver color screw), they are different.  A wire from the roof, going to your apartment and all apartments below would benefit each of them by protecting your electronics, and protecting the people from potential ESD and shock harms.  If you don’t want to tear open walls, then it can be added separately from the other wires, but then it would be hard to ground the apartment outlets with it.  As a shortcut people want to tie the ground wire to a water pipe so that they don’t have to route it all the way to ground.  When this is done wrong by using dissimilar metals they will react like a battery, corrode, loose electrical contact, and defeat the purpose of having the ground wire, with no obvious warning, only inspections will discover the problem.  Make sure that an electrician (journyman, journywoman) brings the wiring up to code. 

FCC (Federal Communication Commission) regulates interference by allotting bandwidths to this or that purpose.  The transceiver antenna is made for a different frequency than your other devices, your cell phone should get fabulous signal strength.  But Chris is right, there are harmonics (side-bands), and they will be strong in your apartment (and the grounded shielding will severely weaken them), so keep an eye on interference with your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cordless phone, and cathode ray tube (older TVs), and other electronics.  Report the interference to the building board, the cellular company, and the FCC if the problem persists.

Tell your building board to put a wind turbine or some solar panels on the roof instead, solar panels are heavy but they are so quiet.    I don’t recommend an industrial transceiver antenna on your roof, it sounds like all greed and no sense to me, a bad combination.

After reading all of these posts I have decided to don an aluminum foil hat and live in a cave. Has anyone ever done a longterm study of the effects of electromagnetism on the human brain?  We have been messing with these devises for over a century and since our brains operate by electric impulses, could there have been lonterm effects that lead to changes in brain patterns? This is indeed heavy stuff for me. I flip a switch and magic happens! I should have paid more attention in physics class. we did play with vandergraf generators.  All this is a moot point anyway as on Dec. 21, 2012 the Mayan calendar clearly shows that mankind will be totally destroyed.

Cap’t Jack