Killer Apartment Vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure?

An anonymous reader writes "I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting twenty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Please help me make an enlightened decision."

Comments

If you are worried about it...

[AlexiaDeath]

Dont buy it. You will worry yourself sick whatever we say.

Re:If you are worried about it...

[HangingChad]

Don't worry until you have had a radiation team doing measurements in your apartment and found out that the levels are near what's considered unhealthy.

Time, distance and shielding are your friends. But that's really immaterial here, the perception is what you have to consider. Not just for yourself but when you want to sell it sometime in the future.

I can go on for hours about why it's safe to live under power lines, but if it's your house, it's not going to sell. I'd take a pass. Not because of the microwaves, but because of the resale issues.

Re:If you are worried about it...

[the biologist]

"On a walk last summer, he ran into one of his few neighbors, a man who lives in a cottage about 100 yards away. During their chat, the man’s cellphone rang, and Segerbäck, 54, was overcome by nausea. Within seconds, he was unconscious."

The guy in the article only develops symptoms of exposure when he realizes he's being exposed. He's a paranoid lunatic to a severe degree. It is probable that medication will help him, but not until he accepts that the problem is internal not external in nature.

Re:recent cellphone radiation reports

[jabuzz]

And then fail utterly to find a controlled study that shows repeatable results.

Lets make this clear, in over fifty years of trying nobody and I repeat nobody has yet managed to do a REPEATABLE study that shows harmful effects of low level non-ionizing radiation.

The key factor here is REPEATABLE. If it cannot be repeated it is just a meaningless statistical fluke.

Re:Yes, you are being a jackass

[Anonymous Coward]

If exposure to asbestos was of any danger to the public health,[sic] there is no way you would be seeing asbestos anywhere near apartment complexes.

Re:...and pick a better title...

[ElectricTurtle]

That's because those arguments are utter crap. Just like there was an article on /. not long ago (too lazy to search for it) about a transmission tower in Africa where a group of crackpots were saying they were allergic to its signals; however, they found out later that it had been turned off for weeks during a period they supposedly had 'symptoms'.

It's non-ionizing radiation. It doesn't impart enough energy to have harmful effects.

So yeah, thank you, Congress. At least you get things right occasionally.