ESB Communications Structure on McKee Avenue, Finglas

pprendeville

Hi all,

Got a flier in the door today from Roisin Shortall of The Labour Party. Apparently, the ESB have applied for planning permission to erect "a 30m free standing communications monopole, carrying antennae and communication dishes with associated ground mounted equipment cabinets within a 2.4m high palisade compound, to share with other licensed operators".

Anyone know if these emit potentially dangerous signals like the mobile phone masts? Don't want to be going round in 10 years time with a big lump in my head after not going to the trouble of finding out if they're a potential danger to our health.

drunken_munky52

There are fears that mobile phone masts present a threat to health. The emissions of energy from these towers is considered hazardous by some people. The fact is that mobile phone masts look pretty scary. They are big high-tech things that look like something ingeniously created in science fiction. Also, they're all over the place, like satellite dishes, and give the whole scene a "no longer last century" feel to it. Also, they often get conveniently situated on schools, churches, hospitals, etc, because like cats they like to have a good vantage point of the surrounding territory. With these great arrays of antennae you'd expect the amount of radiation to be given off would be something really astonishing, and that anyone quite close would be fried by the electromagnetic flux density. Pigeons, on landing on the deadly arrays, would drop dead Kentucky-fried*. Also, as commercial interests and authority spin have sometimes got a bad reputation because of safety assurance in the past which later turned out to be false, for example they said atomic energy was safe, it brings the whole scientific pronouncement business into disrepute! So, mobile phone masts, they must be dangerous, mustn't they? They LOOK dangerous, and I heard that someone who once went near a mobile phone mast one night a month later caught the flu, so, these things aren't safe, are they?

Well, it all depends on whether you want to look at things by guesswork and look-and-feel, or whether you look at the actual facts. I'm not going to tell you whether mobile phone masts are dangerous or not, but I am going to explain what the danger is in relative terms to other things. The thing that makes mobile phone masts a bit different to broadcast radio transmitters and pager transmitters and television transmitters, is the fundamental fact that the mobile phone masts have to transmit to mobile phones AND RECEIVE FROM THEM! It is by its very nature a TWO-WAY communication. Also, all the phones the mast is in two-way communication with are within a short distance of it. There's no point in the tower communicating with phones hundreds of miles away when there are other towers inbetween.

Now, this is the key feature: The two-way nature of the system means that a mast will only talk to a phone if the phone can talk to the mast. Therefore the actual power output of the mast in its communication with a particular phone is similar to that of the phone it's in contact with. It's like being in the street shouting to someone standing on top of the tower, and them shouting back to you. If you were further away, there's no point in the person on top of the tower shouting ten times as loud if they can't hear your reply.

So, the actual power of the transmission is similar to that of an ordinary mobile phone. It's actually slightly more, but it's not VASTLY more. The mast is communicating on a two-way basis with a set of phones in its zone. There are typically a dozen channels and four time-slots, so in effect the actual total power is fifty times that of a phone. But because of the inverse-square law, the bottom line is this: If your head is seven times further away from a mobile phone mast than it is from a phone, you are being bombarded by more radiation from the phone than from the mast!

So, if you are right underneath a mobile phone mast in a school playground, you are probably 40ft from the mast aerial, but if you use a mobile phone anywhere at all, you've got the phone right near your head, which is very considerably nearer than 7 times.

So, if phone masts are dangerous, then using a mobile phone is reckless and lethal.

However, no-one thinks of the phone as dangerous because it's just a small neat gadget that you can carry around and besides everyone's got them and they don't suffer from it. Meanwhile the mast looms dark in the distance as if some sinister sci-fi threat is upon us. The fact is that because of the two-way communication, if there's any danger it's the phone that's the more dangerous!

The other thing is that there are much more powerful transmitter masts around all over the place, but you can't see them. Therefore they don't appear so threatening.

Also, the type of radiation involved is important. It's not radioactive or ionising radiation, it's radio waves. It's like light in lots of ways. If you could see the radio waves coming off mobile phones and off the mobile phone masts, the phone would glow like a bedside light, and the mast would be a combined set of lamps which in total would amount to approximately as bright as a 100 watt lightbulb. But as it's right up on top of a building it would not be as blinding as if you stared right into the bedside light of the phone.

The conclusion: Mobile phone masts; if they're dangerous, then using a mobile phone is much more dangerous. You receive a small dose of radio waves from a phone, but an even smaller amount from a mast, even if you are quite close to it.

spideog7

There was a thread the other day that briefly covered some of this stuff if you want to browse through it:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055636483

backboiler

The monkey talks sense! Great post.

pprendeville

thanks for that in depth reply. Much appreciated. Usually use speaker phone. Think the mast is communicating with thousands of mobile phones at any given time though so would imagine the signal is strong.

drunken_munky52

pprendeville wrote: »

thanks for that in depth reply. Much appreciated. Usually use speaker phone. Think the mast is communicating with thousands of mobile phones at any given time though so would imagine the signal is strong.

Yes, but the same power is been used by the mast as is been used by the phone, regardless of the amount of phones. Think of the mast as just another phone, thats what it is, just a scary looking monster looming above you. Its the same principle as a walkie talkies.

DublinDilbert

drunken_munky52 wrote: »

Yes, but the same power is been used by the mast as is been used by the phone, regardless of the amount of phones. Think of the mast as just another phone, thats what it is, just a scary looking monster looming above you. Its the same principle as a walkie talkies.

This is true to a point, as each GSM channel will support support multiple calls from multiple phones. Where as each phone will only get a time slice of the channel for responding to the tower.

Some times your best to live closer to the mast than further away. As your phones transmit power, which is next to your head, will be dependant on how strong the incoming signal is from the nearest cell tower.