BAWUG readers: I roped you into this socalwug thread because I wanted to hear what you all would say. read the email below to find out what I am responding to...
this is so sad. it is an absolute load that people are actually able
to make their way into a court to talk about something like this. "substantial body of evidence". what are they talking about?
Beats me. I am a ham radio operator. I have been playing with radios for forty years. I have spent great amounts of time pumping hundreds of watts of HF, VHF, and UHF radio energy into my body. Other than some obvious mental aberations that most of you have already noticed, I seem to be OK. (Note to the humor impaired: this last statement was intended as a joke. I actually think that my mental processes are normal and intact. YMMV)
there isn't a fact in this supporting these claims. it is absolute slander.
Well, it is rather difficult to prove a negative but there sure is a dearth of any hard evidence that supports the theory that RF at power levels below those that cause gross heating of tissues poses any threat.
tests quite to the contrary have indicated that RF is 100% harmless.
No, they do not prove that. The tests just fail to support correlation between RF energy exposure and negative effects on biological tissue. They imply that there is no connection but they don't actually prove anything. As I already indicated, it is darned hard to prove a negative.
they have done studies with rats and RF and they used signals thousands of times stronger than those emitted by your Waps and they couldn't prove it even gave the rats headaches. this kind of suggestion is just silly and should those spewing it should be forced to produce evidence or shut up.
That I agree with. They should be required to prove the positive since we can't prove the negative.
But we can get some clues from our understanding of physics on a quantum level. Unfortunately most of this stuff is magic to most people so they don't even try to understand and instead resort to hearsay, inuendo, and unsupported circumstantial evidence.
RF radiation is not ionizing radiation. Unlike UV, X-Ray, and Gamma, individual photons at RF frequencies can't break chemical bonds. Chemical bonds won't break unless you raise the energy level (field strength) so high you get significant heating effects and break the bonds thermally. We already accept the fact that it is a bad idea to stick your head into a microwave oven and turn it on. Even sticking your Wi-Fi card's antenna in your mouth while it is transmitting isn't going to do anything to you. The field strength just isn't high enough.
So, yeah, I would say this is a specious, groundless lawsuit.
But the lawmakers have never added the clause I have always wanted in our laws, the clause at the end of every law that reads, "... unless you are being stupid." There are a lot of people out there who paid insufficient attention in school to be able to discern the difference between science and magic and so ignore the former in order to focus on the latter. These people seem to revel in their right to be stupid and to bring frivolous lawsuits thinking that if they can get enough people to agree, that somehow makes it so. After all, if it works for religion ...
Brian
-- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
