Slashdot Mirror
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."
The FCC enforces on a case-by-case basis. Unless someone has turned this situation (this SPECIFIC apartment being this close to a transmitting antenna) to the FCC, then chances are that they have no idea the situation even exists. As for my $0.02, you don't want to spend any more time than you have to being 20 feet from a transmitting antenna, LET ALONE living next to one.
Are there any laws against passive shielding inside your flat? After all, you could simply put standard metal office furniture inside your flat, and that would cause massive interference, too. I'd say, if the phone company doesn't want the signal to be blocked by whatever is inside a flat, it should put the tower somewhere where it won't be blocked by something inside a flat.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Even though I'm skeptical that relatively low levels of microwave radiation could really be harmful, I thought I should point out that these metallic coatings or similar solutions do not absorb the radiation, they merely reflect it. Since complete coverage (floor, ceiling, windows, doors, etc) isn't realistic, you may easily reduce radiation overall but you might be allowing standing waves in certain locations, concentrating the radiation here and there, like hot spots in a microwave oven. An appartment is much bigger than a microwave oven, the walls are less flat, and there is more absorption etc. But the overall principle still applies to some degree. So I guess if I were worried enough about microwave radiation, still bought the apartment, but applied these reflective paints and such, then I'd also be worried about standing waves. Sniffing these out would be very time-consuming.