I quite like Trevor29′s take on this.

What exactly is Sue Kedgley’s position on this?

Does she have a problem with the asthetics of the towers destoying the pristine environment that they inhabit in the Urban landscape?

Is it the potential life threatening health hazzards caused by the very low levels of UHF radiation that these towere emit?

Where should these cell phone towers (poles might be a better word for the low-power sites) be placed? To get good coverage using low power and allowing frequency reuse, they need to be near the users. Locating them beside parks and school playgrounds (areas of low average numbers of people) would seem preferable to me than beside shops, homes and businesses.

Actual consultation with nearby residents is likely to hit the NIMBY syndrome.

Trevor.

Very well informed posts Trevor29.

Sue, is the issue here the lack of consent involved in erecting a cell tower? or the fear of exposure to ‘harmful’ radiation leading to a perceived need of further consultation (or regulation on their construction)?

In my opinion, the visual impact of a cell tower is extremely minimal anyway, not quite at the same visual impact level of a wind turbine (which I believe are aesthetically pleasing).

On the plus side, the children at the school will have good cellphone reception!

Another detail to keep in mind when thinking about exposure to radiation – it follows an inverse-square law. A 100 milliWatt signal at a range of 1 metre exposes you to 10 times the radiation from a 1 Watt signal at a range of 10 metres. Cell phones themselves can put out more than 100 milliWatts and are used at ranges much less than 1 metre. A range of other devices are rated for power levels in the 1-100 milliWatt region including bluetooth headphones and headsets (hands-free car phones anyone?), wireless networks, cordless phones, etc. Many of these devices are actually or almost touching the user.

Cell phone towers use directional aerials. These concentrate the signal into the horizontal plane, so little signal escapes upwards or downwards. (More accurately, the beam is usually tilted down slightly.) This means that someone standing within 10-20 metres of the tower is not getting the full signal from the transmitter, and someone directly underneath the tower is in a weaker signal area rather than a high-strength zone that might be expected. The gain of the aerial allows lower power levels to be used at both ends (tower and mobile phone).

What is often overlooked is that there is no advantage in transmitting a much stronger signal from the cell phone tower than from the phone. If the cell phone tower can’t hear the phone, then the call isn’t going to work, no matter how much power the cell phone tower puts out. Therefore while the cell phone tower does use higher power levels than the cell phones, it is only a few times higher in power. To people near the cell phone user (e.g. in the same room or the same car), the power levels from the cell phone will exceed that from the cell phone tower they are using.

Paradoxically the way to reduce the exposure from cell phones and cell phone towers is to have more cell phone towers, so the average range of a connection is reduced and lower power levels can be used at both ends. This isn’t going to be possible if cell phone towers can’t be set up near where the users are.

Trevor.

Radiation always raises concerns which are usually out of proportion to the actual dangers.

One of the reasons for this is confusion between different types of radiation. Cell phones operate at frequencies similar to microwave ovens and (UHF) televisions. This radiation is non-ionising, i.e. the frequency is too low to cause ionisation, unlike X-Rays, Gamma Rays and Cosmic Rays. Visible light is exactly the same type of radiation – electromagnetic radiation – and lies in between cell phones and ionising radiation, with infra-red on the cell-phone side and ultra-violet on the X-Ray side. In other words, cell phone radiation is closer to the heat radiation from a heat lamp than it is to UV, X-Rays or other ionising radiation.

Incidentally electromagnetic radiation has almost nothing in common with other forms of nuclear radiation (neutrons, alpha or beta radiation, etc) other than the word “radiation”.

Another reason for the paranoia is that without equipment, radiation is undetectable – you can’t feel it, see it (except for visible light), hear it, taste it or smell it. Yet with the right equipment, it can be detected at very low levels – many orders of magnitude below what could be considered dangerous. This seems to have escaped the notice of one council that allowed a cell phone site providing there was “no detectable radiation at the property boundary”. (Since a cell phone is capable of detecting such radiation, this essentially meant that the tower was permitted only if it didn’t work at all.)

Trevor.

(Now, I wonder if anyone can pick up on why that comment is incredibly apt and at the same time ironic.)

Hysteria.