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NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy
prostoalex writes "The New York Times discusses the controversy of placing cell phone towers on top of hills, a practice to which many people object. According to the article, people frequently complain about the visual impediment and are afraid that property values will decline or some health damage will be done with radio waves. At the same time, people get quite irritated when proper phone service is not provided by the operators, and the calls keep dropping or coverage is poor outside of densely populated areas. Phone companies also lease the land to place the cell phone tower for $30,000-$50,000, which is attractive to many landowners, but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
It's a sweet deal if you happen to own a piece of land that a phone company wants to use for a tower. For whatever reason, they prefer to lease land rather than buy, and they pay pretty well for the priveledge of doing this. My mother has such a piece of land, and it nets her around $1000/month last I heard.
What really makes the deal sweet though is that the amount of land taken up by the tower is really small, and you're free to do anything else on the land that you want. I suppose what they're really leasing from you is the privlege to put a tower on your property.
In my mother's case it's a rental property with a fair amount of land, and the tower sits back far from the house. So it doesn't really interfere with the tennants lives, and it basically gives her money-for-nothing every month.
Ok, lets just get ONE THING F*ING CLEAR:
Radiation is not like other everyday occurances, either radiation ionizes your molecules/atoms, or it dosen't. It's not like pushing a car down the road, where you will get thre no matter what, its just a mater of time, no. It's more like pushing a car up a hill, either your strong enough, or not.
Thats is why lab rats get cancer, or other assorted forms of doom, when they are exposed to "Cell phone like radiation", they get a higher dose to 'accelerate' (change the outcome of, whatever) the experiment. If they were given the dose that you recieve from standing a few hundred feet from a tower, or holding a cell phone an inch or so from your brain the rats would have jack.
Do some research, folks. Better yet, how bout the media do a bit of reporting! Tell folks what I just did, DUMB IT DOWN, make peoiple understand that unless the tests are fair, they mean SQUAT.
Sorry for all the shouting. False science makes me angry. You should hear me in my programing class.
md5sum
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Here in Coral Gables, Florida (The City Beautiful) there are quite a few cellphone towers disguised as trees. http://www.fraudfrond.com/
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
A company named Larson has done exactly as you suggest for lots of different towers.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
In my town, there is a cell tower that looks like a Douglas Fir tree. If you know it is a cell tower, you can tell that it's false, but people usually don't notice it until being told it is a cell tower. Something like -- "do you see something odd on that hill over there?" isn't usually enough. Something like "see that tree next to the _____ and up from the _____, that's a cell tower." That's usually enough to help people pick it out.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The fake tree cell towers I've seen are 1) much taller than the surrounding trees, 2) not shaped like the nearby trees, and 3) regular in shape, unlike real trees.w ireless/Cell-Tower-Tree.jpg
n gs.htm
For instance:
http://campus.champlain.edu/faculty/whitmore/img/
or
http://danbricklin.com/log/0f010790.jpg
or
http://www.80acres.com/Stupid%20things/stupid_thi
which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
No, it doesn't, NYT articles linked from iWon don't require registration and login.
You need to learn some physics as well. There is a difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Yes, you are correct, the power level is not what determines the difference, but that doesn't mean that *all* photons can cause ionization. There is something called the photoelectric effect. Below a certain frequency threshold (depends on the material somewhat, but is all in the visible or higher) a photon does not have enough energy to ionize material. Therefore, microwave photons are not going to ionize anything at 1 milli-watt or 100 watts. The primary way that microwave radiation is thought to cause damage is by localized heating, and therefore the intensity of the radiation does matter. Would you rather keep your hand in warm water for 1 minute or boiling water for 5 seconds? You claim that the tests performed are fair and done by people who understand what's happening. Mostly you are right, but some tests have been done by biologists who know little about physics and have applied the wrong models for radiation dosage in their studies. Yes, if you microwave the crap out of a mouse, it will be damaged. No, that doesn't mean that the same damage will happen at a lower intensity over a longer period of time.
Having been a leasing and zoning consultant on cell towers a while ago, here are some factoids:
- The fake tree approach is made difficult by the fact that the towers need to be extremely stiff. The antennas are tuned to radiate very precise flat lobes with minimal back/up/down-scatter. Even a bit of flex ruins the pattern. That's why the flagpoles and trees look so ungainly and out-of-proportion.
- Camouflage - fake trees, fake flagpoles, fake chimneys, etc. - are ungodly expensive. You can make a fake chimney, but it has to be out of fiberglass sculpted to match the building. There can be no internal metal frame which would block the signal, and even sharp interior corners of the fiberglass panels were rejected by the RF engineers. When you try to blend something into a building facade, differential weathering of exposed surfaces makes the antenna show up anyway, and you have to keep sending out painters to reapply the "make-up". $$$ The trees have to be made out of something that will stand up to weather and look OK for many years. Pine needles (fake trees are almost always "pines") in front of the antennas have to be designed not to scatter the signal. Who wants to climb the pole and replace branches? $$$
- Overly tall poles are rare. The higher the pole, the more other cells that pole can "see", the more interference. You only see really tall poles or towers in very flat areas where the RF engineers can spread things way out. In even modest topography, the coverage area per pole is surprisingly small. This is exacerbated, as pointed out in the article, by the rising demand for "in-building coverage" which requires much stronger signals.
- The best solution I was never able to implement was one which strung a series of small antennas along existing power/phone pole lines. Planners in the rich suburbs were much more amenable to this kind of thing, and the tech exists somewhat, but negotiating an agreement among the several utility companies who own the poles and right-of-ways jointly proved infuriating to the the (unbelievably impatient and fractious) cellphone companies.
- My advice: If you're rich and you're about to get a tree tower giving you the finger from the highest hill in your otherwise pristine town, hire a consultant to negotiate a deal with your utility companies to let the wireless carriers string tiny repeaters down your streets. If you make an alternative available, the wireless company pretty much has to take it.