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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."
Fro $50k / hill / month, I'll be happy to play the role of persona non grata.
As someone who has had a cell phone tower on their property, I think it's a pretty sweet deal. And they aren't really that intrusive anymore, some designs are actually rather low profile, of course those are only meant for rural town coverage, but it's still not so bad.
And the 28,000 we recieve a year is as much as the income of a low-income family.
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
That way no one can see them from afar ;)
Wind farms are seen the same.
Its an expansion of the technological lifestyle, and a shift away from the purity of nature.
I'm all for people reusing industrial/hidden rundown areas for these eyesores, and prefer to keep the countryside views clear.
liqbase
Cannot most of these towers be esthetically disguised as, say, eagle-nesting platforms, power-generating windmills, or some sort of tall, carbon-based, sunlight-absorbing life-form?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
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.
For $50k a month, I'd be happy to host a cell tower on my head.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Not In My Back Yard for...
Cell phone towers
Windmill farms
Nuclear power plants
People would love the benefits of all three, but only if they're nowhere to be seen, or in the case of the nuke plants, just far, far away.
I hope for karmic retribution for these people.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
"but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
That's easy to fix. If anybody complains, threaten to turn up the power!
"Derp de derp."
I know cell phone towers are becoming a bane for us amateur astronomers. They are even sprouting up in remote dark sites that were once safe havens from light pollution. At a minimum if the towers would use red instead of white light the problem wouldn't be as bad.
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
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
People want to have their cake and it also. Right in front of my house is a huge electric tower that take power to an Intel fab about a mile away. Yes, they wanted Intel to set up a plant here. No, nobody was willing to sacrifice a little for the benefits. Anything new to see here? no, I don't think so
please excuse my apathy
Make the tower look like a tree! Sheesh!
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
The visual blight caused by regular phone poles and electrical poles is far worse than for cel towers. Why do people accept regular phone poles but make such a fuss over cel towers? Regular phone poles are much more dangerous as well - consider the number of people who are hurt or killed when they hit them with cars...
Surely just painting them light blue or white to suit the sky would make them half dissapear. Cheap and easy solution for a non problem.
Oh, and for the record- our TV reception SUCKS.
In Australia, they've started renting space in church steeples. They make the antennae very unobtrusive, and their RF and SONET gear doesn't take up much space. Pumps quite a bit of money into churches that can be used for community projects, aid, missions, etc.
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.
Go team slashdot.
r s.html?ei=5058&en=6871db49a586b2da&ex=1115611200&p artner=IWON&pagewanted=all&position=
"The towers, sometimes disguised as fir trees, cacti or flagpoles, were once confined mostly to sparsely populated stretches of highway or industrial zones. More are being planted in residential areas as the wireless companies - responding to subscriber demands - race to build their networks for seamless coverage."
Look at the article to see the pictures of the mentioned cacti and fir tree
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
That you no longer have property rights to do what you please with your property you own. You can't build without a permit, you can't build without getting your plans ok'ed by local zoning boards. You can't develop on your land if it isn't zoned right.
The one thing that retains best value in America and you can't do what you please with it when you own it. Property rights are the biggest thing for a free society, without them you have nothing.
If you had proper property rights for land you own you wouldn't need the EPA becuase you could sue those big companies that polute your land and get the proper restitution for them destroying your land. But perversions in propery rights have made people dependent on the State to receive alimony for damages.
In my town there are two cell sites (although I still can't get service at my house, so for some reason Verizon Wireless doesn't seem to use these towers, but that's beside the point). One is hidden away in the town church's steeple, which is nice because it gets the church money that it needs and also provides cell service without an eyesore. The other is disguised as a giant (and I mean giant) flagpole next to the main highway. So both provide service (or so I'm told) without making the eyesore of a traditional tower.
There's some spammy/spyware like "iWon" thing wrapped in that link. It places a little "iWon" banner at the top of the NYT page, which of course links to some bullshit "iWon" page, which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
r s.html?
I'm not sure what else it does as I'm running OmniWeb on my Mac, but Windows users beware.
Clean link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Now an eye-sore, it still can be.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
This tool's email address is moskalyuk@gmail.com in case you want to send him some spam of your own.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Wind power turbines tend to be placed on monopoles taller than cell phone towers. Furthermore, the "best wind" is often near mountain ridges. The result is that the wind towers that would produce the most electricity tend to be the worst aesthetically.
The cell phone tower v. skyline blight wars will pave the way for (or bottle up) the deployment of wind farms on ridges across the United States. Standard NIMBYism continues with cell towers, and more NIMBYism will come down the pike with wind power.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
mutated trees
being done already along Interstate 287 in NJ, among other places. Right at the 202/206 interchange on the southbound side, there's a 'tree' with no leaves except an odd triangle shaped assortment at the top. The trunk is hexagonal as well.
It doesn't bear intense scrutiny, but it kinda sorta blends in.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Mesmer's patients honestly felt that he had helped cure them. You know, come to think of it, we should build more cell phone towers. I mean, all that EM radiation is good for you.
English is easier said than done.
>transmitters installed inside the church towers
... thus ringing in a whole new set of changes on the art of change-ringing ... The Ringing World
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
As much as I hate to side with phone companies, 'cos I think they're ugly, I do like to see people who bitch about "property values" get rammed in the ass even more. I think it's bullshit that people are allowed to dictate to others what they can or cannot do based on the effect it will have on their property values. It's just yet another way to infringe on personal freedoms so someone else can get richer.
More agenda-setting, just like with Augusta and the Masters not allowing women members. Only a "controversy" because the NYT ran 100 piece on it.
Yawn.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
or some health damage will be done with radio waves.
The one time wearing a tin foil hat would be optimal...
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Who are you to say what somebody else should do with their property?
I wasn't a fanboy when Sega was around, and by god, I'm not one now.
If you read the article, I think you'll see that the key point of the article isn't the usual NIMBY issues, it's that the town basically rejected the cell tower so Verizon used federal law (and the appelate courts) to trump them and get it put in anyway. The locals were willing to live with spotty coverage, but the cell tower was forced on them anyway.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I read an article in Wired Magazine, i believe, that showed some examples of disguising cell phone towers, the most popular model was a large tree, hidden in a batch of trees, you wouldn't know it's there!
Forget what the parent mentioned
Use common sense. Do YA THINK the parent is stupid? Does he/she SEEM stupid?
Well, then, it probably is.
For example, some people actually BELIEVED the EPA when they said the air in downtown Manhattan was safe right after 9/11.
But what did common sense tell you? Did it seem like the air could possibly be safe?
Use common sense.
As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.
A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.
Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.
Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.
SoupIsGood Food
I've always thought many/most towers could be made to look like a work of art. If the skyline is going to be invaded, might as well make it interesting. Think of creative spires. Probably could even be designed with light materials and retrofitted to many existing towers.
Heck, maybe somone is already doing it.
Heck, the non-camoflauged towers make the NJ landscape look BETTER.
Disguising cell towers as trees isn't a bad idea, if it looks reasonable. I've seen a few in California that blend in pretty well. Here on the east coast, though, I've seen more than enough "conifers" that are about 3 times taller than the surrounding treeline. I think I'd rather just see the tower...
In the college town that I live in, they rececntly mounted cell antennas onto the smokestack of the heating plant. They're painted red to blend in with the brick, and they're barely noticable. With all the unused mills in New England, this seems to be a good option.
Some others have commented on the similar complaints that people have concerning wind mills. Personally, I find them to be somewhat attractive. They have a sense of majesty and peace that cell/radio towers don't seem to have. Perhaps the knowledge that they're providing energy without causing too much damage helps my opinion of them.
It's funny that the parent got modded "-2 Overrated" when no-one had previously modded it at all!
It's also worth noting that the parent stimulated a noticable conversation ... which is a more interesting indicator of quality than "over/underrated".
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
use common sense, could the earth really be round? obviously you would fall off if you lived on the side or bottom. common sense says taht what looks flat is flat so the earth is probably flat
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If the community objects to what a landowner does with their property, they can pay the landowner to not do it.
I strongly object to the notion that any kind of neighborhood management group can tell me what I can or cannot do on my property. I think the same principle applies here.
If the community doesn't like it, they can put up or shut up.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Speaking as someone who may wind up with some wind turbines "IMBY", I'd really rather not have them, and it's not because I find them unattractive. It's because I'd rather not live with the nearly-subsonic "whup-whup-whup" they generate, night and day. Considering they wouldn't even be worth building without federal subsidies, I say, NOT IN MY BACKYARD!
If common sense is applying 4th grade reasons to 2nd grade questions then Yes, This is common sense. -Average is dumb "wooooopsieeeeez"
Average is dumb
In my area, the cell "towers" are just antennas bolted to the side of already-hideous water towers or even disguised as a freakishly enormous flag pole. The flag pole is at a major intersection in the next town. It's more huge than you would ever expect to see in a town the size of Harwich, MA. But still, it could be a lot worse. The technology these days does make it possible to conceal these things. I doubt it's that much more expensive to do it like this. In the case of the water tower, it's probably quite a bit cheaper since they don't have to build the tower. Plus the money goes right to the town. I wonder why it's not more common.
I guess it's a mixed bag. The NIMBYs that throw a fit when someone wants to put up a cell tower are the same morons that are freaking out about the Wind Farm project in Nantucket Sound. It's free, clean energy and our oil addiction is destroying us.
I'm pretty off-topic here. Sorry.
I've lived under a cell phone tower my whole life and I've never had any health probbbb3839q9328!#!)NO CARRIER
Just wait until someone dies because they couldn't call 911, thanks to having poor cell coverage in an area that the NIMBY crowd blocked new cell tower construction.
;)
Are you a wireless carrier? Go for the "What about the children's safety?" angle. That'll get 'em.
It used to be said that everybody wants to be 5 minutes from an airport, but nobody wants to have an airport in their area. The public is stupid.
Phone Customer: The reception in my area is poor
Phone support: Yes, that is because we have no transmitters in your area.
Phone Customer: Why not? I deserve to have good reception, I pay my bills
Phone support: We had planned to build one last year at the request of people in your area, but people in your area protested and the plan was scrapped. So, what do you want?
Phone Customer: I want perfect reception in the middle of nowhere, with not a tower to be seen.
Phone support: have a nice day.
I think that about sums it up.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I was driving down the interstate in Mississippi north of Jackson, and saw a cell tower that didn't look like a cell tower. It kind of looked like the washington monument - a big monolith. It didn't look too bad. Maybe this is what they should do more often - disguise the cell towers as other things, like the big cross on the hill down in Rio. I'm sure they hang some cell nodes off that thing.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
soon as cellular goes ad-hoc, you wont have to worry about towers, maybe antennas on buildings.
If you're receiving FM radio on your speakers without an actual radio attached, it's probably due to interference from another radio receiver (not necessarily a radio transmitter) nearby.
Almost all tunable radio receivers since the 1920's have been built around a principle called superheterodyning - reducing and tuning the received signal by mixing it with another signal.
This process causes the receiver to weakly transmit the received signal at a lower frequency (FM broadcast receivers have standardized on 10.7 MHz, AM broadcast receivers have standardized on 455kHz). Poorly-built receivers can retransmit with a signal that can be picked up with hundreds or thousands of feet away.
Any circuit with an inductor, a capacitor, a diode, and audio outputs (such as your phone and speakers) will act as an AM crystal radio, which is all you need to pick up such a retransmission.
The radio stations you hear as interference reflect the demographics of those who own shoddy radios.
How long until municipalities are sued because they put in municipal WiFi which is "irradiating" everyone? If everyone's not complaining because they're being cooked from the inside out, will they be bitching about how their tax dollars are paying for service which doesn't work?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Ah, well, there was one instance of an MRI causing a fatality. Or rather, the neglegently placed large metal gas cylinder (oxygen iirc, though that's tangental to the story) being sucked into the torus by the strength of the field, splattering the person inside was the cause. Big magnets are nothing to screw around with and innocuous looking items/situations can become quite deadly around them. But yeah, so long as nothing ferrous does a bullet-time ballet into your body because of the field, you'll be fine. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
> Now an eye-sore, it still can be.
WTF? Yoda posting to slashdot...
The pastor constantly looking up, asking, "can you hear me now?"
I know the tower he's talking about. While it's not that bad looking, and it does just look like a very awkward tree... it's twice as tall as the trees around it... defeats the purpose, no?
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
I often look at old architecture, old bridges, and other public works of the early 1900's and note the artistic touches - and miss it in today's modern poured-in-place world.
Over in old Pasadena, on Colorado Boulevard, there are some old bridges that bring tears to my eyes just to see them... they are so beautifully designed.
For me, there is a lot more than structural integrity alone on my mind as I construct a retaining wall on my property... there is a very important issue to me of what the wall looks like. The appearance of this wall is extremely important to me.... as well as my neighbors. ( It will be a cobblestone-brick design... labor intensive, but in my mind, worth it. )
Artists come in all types. Some work with technology ( us ), some with paint, some with architecture, as well as other media. All the work is a tribute to the artist and his culture.
I feel this is what it is to be human. Our existence is summarized in our art. Swine don't care...as long as they get fed. And that't the main difference between us and swine.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Around here the towers are usually just on the side of a building or a lamp post or something. Perhaps if they put a larger number of sites in, they wouldnt have to make them so damn high.
In England, they have a practice of disguising cel phone antennae in a variety of creative ways, for example, with a fiberglass stone facade to blend in with a church's spires.
Why can't they do this in the US? For that matter, why not just attach a cel phone antenna to the top of a tall, already existing tree? Unless there's major hurricanes or tornadoes to knock one over (a condition which would effect a tower mounted antenna as well), you wouldn't see them, except for fall (unless you bolt them to conifers).
If you use the preexisting tree scenario, you save millions if not more, because you aren't wasting money on constructing towers out of steel. In fact, with that scenario, you can built antennae on mountains, etc, as far as you want. The added benefit is, of course, conservation, because the more trees standing around your antenna, the more relocation options you have for virtually zero cost.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Here's some free clue, lemming: any kind of electromagnetic radiation is made of photons. Yes, exactly what goes for visible light, goes for any other wavelength.
There is no such bullshit threshold where above X watt it's ionizing, under X watt it's not ionizing. If a single photon can cause a transition in an atom or mollecule, it will. That's the only either-or condition.
Pumping more watts, i.e., more of those photons per second, doesn't change that. There is no such thing as needing 100 photons to cause a transition. Either _one_ causes it, or any amount doesn't.
I.e., if something happens at 100W, it happens just as well at 1 milli-Watt or even 1 micro-Watt. You just have more or less of those ionized atoms, depending on the power. That's all.
I.e., those tests _are_ fair, and they're done by people who actually understand what's happening there.
"False science makes me angry."
Well, then do us all a favour and stop spouting bullshit about stuff you don't have any clue about. Actually read a physics book instead of making your own pseudo-science bullshit.
And no, just because you're the latest nerd in a CS university does _not_ make you an expert in everything on Earth. For starters, as you just proved, it doesn't mean jack squat about knowing any physics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I propose that a NIMBY database be developed for any one who signs or protests or what ever cell phone or radio services towers of any sort.
Then when they try to get cellular service, they are DENIED flat out. "Sorry, your a NIMBY, we don't offer service to NIMBY's!"
If they have servce now it should be terminated with one of those curt legal letters they send out. Should specifically outline you a NIMBY jerk and your service has been terminated. Don't bother with the other carriers, we told them too! They don't want you either! Go AWAY!
Just like the article states they want ALL the services but don't want to support it. Too bad.
Cellular services need towers. Done.
1311393600 - Back to Black
If you 'Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers' then you will vastly increase the likelihood of ending up with 'A huge metal eyesore'. And it will probably not work too good as an aerial either.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Here in Wollongong, local artists have painted murals on all the traffic light control boxes. There was an adopt-a-box project, and people vote on the ones they like best.
Yay me!
Hmm. Very predictable answers to the parent but most people do accept assurances of safety in even the most questionable of circumstances.
Let's just say that if you are _the_ black sheep of the village, not to mention the one that lowered their house value by maybe $1000 with that tower... you better have _very_ thick skin. Because it'll make life as a nerd in high school seem pleasant and respectful by comparison.
Anyone thinking that large numbers of people can act like sheep, haven't seen what _small_ numbers of people can do. Your social acceptance or becoming the public enemy can depend on conforming to the local "fashions" in every step you make, every breath you take.
If it's fashionable to hate Mr John Doe for _anything_ whatsoever, people _will_ do it, just to conform to the "community".
E.g., if it's because Mr John Doe built a big mast, and supposedly shaved a couple of cents of someone's property value in the process, even those who _haven't_ lost anything in the process will turn against Mr John Doe. Heck, even people who _gained_ something in the process will do it, just to be on the fashionable and socially acceptable side of the debate.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
An RF engineer knows that lower power from the tower doesn't have anything to do with lower power from the phone. Towers are kept CLOSE TOGETHER to lower the required power output from the phone. It just so happens that having towers close together lowers the amount of power they need to emit in order to reach the phones. In fact, it would be a more accurate statement to say that towers emit lower power because the phones emit lower power, not the other way around. There's no point in having high power at the towers because the phones aren't powerful enough to reach back from that great a distance.
What does the length of a mouse have to do with the effects of non-ionizing radiation on it? Are you supposing that the mouse forms some kind of resonant dielectric cavity or something? This is quite preposterous given that a mouse is far from homogeneous, and even farther from resonant. The Q of a mouse is so incredibly low that it is unlikely in the extreme that there would be any resonance to speak of.
This is something that the medical community doesn't even understand. RF is non-ionizing, so it does not cause damage at the molecular or cellular level. The only effect of non-ionizing incident radiation is heat. That's it. Heat does not cause cancer.
Pine needles? You've got to be kidding me. Reception is poor in forests because of absorption and scattering, not because pine needles are somehow resonant.
Why would you advise someone not to hug a cell phone tower? The tower itself is not the radiating element, at least it had better not be.
Are you REALLY an RF engineer?
Only carriers with similar technology can do that. AT&T and Sprint are a bad example - AT&T uses TDMA/GSM (or at least they did, until Cingular bought them), while Sprint uses CDMA.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Typical NIMBY, people want to use their phones everywhere, but complain about the masts needed to satisfy them. A similar thing is happening where I live, everyone wants cheap flights, but make such a large fuss when they try to extend the local airport to satisfy the demand for flights.
A small group of people have been VERY successful at keeping Ikea out of the Boston Area. It's ok, Boston is not a college town...
Article
This doesn't mean that I can erect a 1000' tower on my property building-codes-be-damned, but it does mean that the county cannot flat-out deny me the right to construct a reasonable tower.
This is being used by some cell companies to set up towers in areas they otherwise cannot - the gameplan goes something like this:
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've been there too. I work with the guy who leases water tower space to Verizon, T-Mobil, Nextel, et al...
I'm also a ham radio enthusiast. It used to be that neighbors didn't care if you put a TV antenna on your roof. It used to be that neighbors didn't care that you had a few wire antennas strung out in your back yard.
Now all that's changed. Thanks to the ignorance of a few empowered art school students who know nothing about either radio, economics, or even public safety (yes, these idiots even balk at the need for police radio antennas), putting up an antenna is nearly impossible. However, should I have wanted to erect a pole of the same size for a flag or even an anemometer --they wouldn't care. I think this has to do with unfortunate choice of words we electrical engineers use to describe antenna performance: Radiation. It scares the art students.
This is the victory of foolish romantics over common sense. I wish these self appointed aesthetics police could learn the true depth of their arrogant stupidity --but they're too far gone for that to happen.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
You know, I like that.
From now on, instead of calling those who object to antennas "luddites" I'll call them art students. Wonderful euphemism.
Many cell towers are 190 ft tall, just for this reason. Lighting is not mandatory unless they are 200 ft AGL or within some distance of an airport.
YOU as an abutter/member of the community, need to demand that the lighting not be installed unless it is required by federal regulation, and, if the cell company says it is, you need to demand proof.
Our family has owned since the 1920s, and I am currently living on a piece of land that is one of the highest points in Baltimore County. As a ham radio operator, this situation has obvious advantages, as undoubtedly it would if I would put up a communications tower. About 10 years ago, Verizon selected a tower site about 1/4 mile away at the local Volunteer Fire Department, which sits at least 60 feet lower than where my house now stands. For the privlege of having to erect 60 foot more tower than they needed to get the same coverage, they pay the local VFD about $15,000 a year. Good for the fire dept and community relations, but from an engineering perspective it is not the best location.
Though my neighbors might think otherwise, I wouldn't mind having a 150 foot tall steel lightning rod nearby on a couple of acres that are just hayfield right now (I have had 3 damaging strikes in the last 2 years). I also wouldn't mind getting a piece of the cell company's largess that they seem to be handing out so freely to site owners.
Putting transponders on hilltops, high-tension towers, water tanks and so on makes practical sense, but I see many cell sites around here chosen for political reasons rather than engineering ones.
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.
... amused by the filename "big_monst05"?
Yes, I'd love to have "Big Monster #5" living next door!
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
http://my.core.com/~lbutler/cellular.html
Correct analogy would have been, in order to test the damaging effect of being soaked in 50 gallons of warm water for 10 hours, we'll flood you with 5000 gallons for 6 minutes.
It seems like most of your comments are missing the point that seems most important to me: Communities are being routinely beaten by the phone companies. Not a single person in that article COMPLAINED about lousy phone reception, on the contrary they were all more than willing to accept lousy phone reception in exchange for not having Verizon tell them where they are putting the tower without their say.
Don't local communities have the right to make that decision? Why do all the technologically-holier-than-thou types assume that people don't realize they will have lousy cell phone reception? Much the same with nuclear plants; seems to me that most people who don't want them, don't want them at ALL, and are very much willing to put up with the consequenses of not having them even if it means building another poluting plant of another type.
Personally, I think it is nice NOT to have cell phone reception everywhere, and it's also nice not to have highways, power lines, billboards, SUVs, Computers, the internet, powerboats, and whatnot everywhere you go. Unfortunately it is getting harder and harder to find places like that in this country.
And I think it's DISGUSTING that Verizon can use a federal court to overturn local zoning ordanances.
"The direction controls are the same in Nethack as they are in vi." "Yeah, I hardly ever die in vi anymore."
Anyhow - when such a tower isn't disguised well - the outcome can be disturbing and humorous at the same time. Recently, I went to visit a relative who lives in the Kansas City, MO area - as my wife and I were driving back to the airport to return home, I saw this huge (it had to be at least 100 feet tall if it was a foot) tree-like thing sticking up out from the middle of a woodsy area - it looked like an ultra-cheap pine xmas tree on steroids. Actually, now that I think about it, it looked like a tree from the game of Myst - where there is an enormously tall trunk, with about the upper quarter containing "branches" - but they stuck out at weird "cheap fake xmas tree" angles. I knew immediately that it was a cell phone tower - but why a "pine tree"? There weren't any pine trees around the area! Certain none that were that tall (I mean this thing just stuck out above everything - it was UGGGGGGLY!!!).
Kansas City might have good bar-b-que - but they can't hide a cell phone tower to save their soul...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
No, I think it has to do with the monstrous eyesores that are being constructed every place you look, called "cell phone antennas". People see how ugly and intrusive these things are, and then you come along and say YOU want to put an antenna up, too. You're getting painted with the cellphone antenna paintbrush.
And yes, they are ugly, and no, I do not want them making the already cluttered community landscape any uglier, and no, they certainly don't belong on every hilltop you can see. And yes, I'm a ham, and I deal with emergency services and the local sheriff's office.
consider the number of people who are hurt or killed when they hit them with cars...
I don't see how one could consider a large stationary object dangerous in this case. Any large rather-immutable object is going to cause injury when you slam into it at high speed... it's like saying that cliffs or steep hills shouldn't be near highways because they are equally dangerous if you impact with them.
Sorry, but a stationary telephone pole isn't hurting anyone. I'd say that the impacter is damaging the pole, and the injury caused by impact to an object of large mass nonspecific to whether the impacted object is in fact a telephone pole.
[wiggles index finger over thumb]...it's the world's smallest violin, playing for everyone who wants to have their cake and eat it too, and whines about it to everyone else.
When you're in Backwater, Mississippi and your car flips and you're in a ditch... I hope you have cell phone service.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Let's assume for now that there is some possible damage from rediation. Will moving those towers out of town reduce the radiation people absorb? NO!
How do absorb this radiation? by holding the cell phone close to your body when taling. That phone is genrating radiation in high enough power that would reach the tower withj useful signal. If you double the distance to the tower, the cell phone would need to produce a signal 4 times stronger. If ypu triple the distance, it would need 9 times the power. Anyway, the phone would adjust the power to be a bit above the minimum needed to maintain communications, and If the tower is further away, the signal would be higher, with signal power proportional to the square of the distance. Further away means muchmore radiation absorbed by human tissue...
But then, it probably doesn't matter much. How many of those opposed to having cellphone towers near them are overweight smokers? Most wouldn't live to see the cancer they would get from their cellphones...
But I still doubt that there is signficant non-thermal influence on chemical reactions by certain 'matching' microwave photons, the only other reasonable cause of adverse effects. AFAIK all the studies in this area are at least highly disputed.
/awful/ lot of them to restore your signal. This is exactly what the brain is good at.
I've been wondering about a couple of other interaction modes and would be interested to hear what people more versed in this stuff can say about them.
1. AM demodulation - if absorbed radio energy in the GHz range varies in a certain period (eg. 100Hz), is there any biological process that may cause a 100Hz signal to be generated in your brain?
2. potential differences - it's all fine that strong chemical interactions aren't likely, but in case of a wavelength of a few centimeters, the maximum difference in potential (1/2 lambda) will fit inside your skull. In case of 'common' radio applications, it won't be enough for an electroshock, but I wonder if it doesn't raise our 'noise floor'. We evolved in an EM environment that was noisy at times, but mostly quite silent. No persistent 'wide' band screeches, strong AM patterns, or GHz carriers.
If you think extremely small currents can't be received by coarse synapses, think LOFAR -- you just take an
The reason I'm asking is that NL has just started with DVB-T transmissions on UHF, UMTS at 2.1GHz is getting some users and that this hugely overrated WiFi-revolution has really picked up steam mid 2004 here. Since that time, I've become quite sensitive to some EM generating equipment in terms of 'hearing' extremely high pitched noises and experiencing concentration loss. If I notice I'm struggling for words, and measure if there's a good WiFi signal, more often than not there is (and if I'm not having the problem, more often than not there's no WiFi -- I'm sure as hell staying away from it now).
The reasoning is: it doesn't ionise, and doesn't cause heat damage, so there's no interaction, not even with a live human brain. I find that reasoning a bit bold, to be honest. Of course the service providers have an interest to keep beating that drum, but that you need to carry the burden of proof if you're worried about health effects is, frankly, not very scientific.
Cheers,
Emile.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)