The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.
I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.
If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.
A quick web search for third-party coverage information tells me that Wanaque has good coverage from Verizon and poor coverage from T-Mobile. It’s easy to guess why T-Mobile might be motivated to change that situation.
Speedtest.net bought a service that was doing this already sort of. I looked just now and I think it’s their “map” option on their mobile app. You need to switch between carriers to see coverage.
The tech was based off of manual speed tests and a background app that would measure coverage from a phone for a small area, about the size of 3 square acres.
Also, they will lose. The FCC has said that the companies can build towers where they are needed for coverage. They might have to make it look like a tree or something, but they cannot be rejected from building it.
With the supreme Court overturning the Chevron decision last week, I’m not so sure that any federal regulatory bodies have much power anymore unless there’s a specific law passed by Congress. That’s what made that decision so dangerous, because the same applies to the FDA now regarding drugs and food.
A good overview of the circumstances of the recent Chevron decision.
Please note the final paragraph. Koch’s goal is exactly this: bringing cases in front of the Supreme Court that, if won, would cause grave disturbances.
This isn’t regulatory. The auctions companies bid on and win have provisions in them that require companies to utilize the spectrum in X years. They must supply coverage if they bought the spectrum; they can’t sit on it.
Be surprised if the courts cause problems with this given that cellphones are 911 devices and a means of making government emergency announcements. Those typical override the wishes of the snti-vaxx Karens of planning boards
They’ve definitely done that before, dunno if it was deliberately. They must have somewhat of an idea how long it takes for nocebo to kick in with the local village idiots, if it’s short enough it could actually be a rather good idea to make waiting a bit a general policy. Tank some mild capital and opportunity cost to prevent having to battle in court and the town newspaper? Sounds like a win to me.
Ackshually, being too close to high power radio frequencies isn’t safe. I remember at one base I was stationed at in Afghanistan, there was a smoke spot we all used to take breaks at. For some reason, I started developing really bad headaches and feeling kind of nauseous. I figured I was just acclimating to the local climate or something. After a few weeks, I was up on our building installing one of our satcom dishes on top of it when I noticed something. Right on the other side of the fence of that smoke area, was a ~2m high powered dish pointing just above above where the smoke area was. I pointed this out to the Norwegians that ran the camp and the break area was promptly moved, lol.
But seriously, I do not understand the anti-5G nutters.
Hell the high power WiFi equipment^‡^ I installed at my Grandma’s house had warnings about keeping a few feet clear of it when powered on due to health concerns and that’s just WiFi equipment. I can’t imagine the dosage of gnarly from a 2m powered dish.
‡ I installed that equipment because she wanted WiFi on all 10 acres of her property and she didn’t want me to install more stations around her property. Now she has the broadcast equipment in her garage with a tape line on the floor like it’s a Goddamned radiation research facility lol
Yeesh, I didn’t even know there were consumer grade WiFi transceivers that were strong enough to cover such a massive area. Was it a small farm or just a big property? That had to have been a pretty expensive WiFi system regardless. Did you use Ubiquiti directional access points or something?
I have a sister that runs a small family farm and she asked my brothers and me (3 of us have IT backgrounds/careers) for viable coverage solutions to their various livestock areas. We settled on just running copper to one barn from her house and broadcasting from there with a few repeaters equipped with trunk channels in order to maintain full duplex.
It’s a small farm and yeah it’s Ubiquiti hardware though I don’t think they sell it anymore. The last time I looked through their website I couldn’t find it again.
Basically this thing is located on one end of the property and on the other end there’s a nano station hooked up to a router because there was still a WiFi dead zone that she wanted covered. But given that that spot was inside a metal barn on the otherside of another metal barn I wasn’t surprised.
Literally able to us the WiFi in a metal barn 50 yards away on the otherside of a garage
It doesn’t faff about
Mowing the field at her place my phone will stay connected to the WiFi basically the whole time, the only WiFi blind spot that I had to fix was on the far side of her property where there’s 2 metal barns, a garage, and a wall of her house between you and the broadcast equipment.
WiFi emissions are tightly regulated and there are no “high power” WiFi equipment unless you flash custom firmware and break the law. The link you posted below is the same power as anything else, up to the maximum allows by law. This is not uncommon, every router / AP does this unless it’s some special low power model.
The higher the frequency, the worse that is. So standing very close to an HF antenna that only broadcasts up to like say 30 megahertz is different than standing next to a 700 megahertz cell phone antenna, which is different from standing next to a 2.5 gigahertz cell phone antenna. The reasoning for that is due to power levels and wavelength of the radio signal itself.
Humans are most sensitive to EM radiation between 30-300 MHz. It tapers off after that, it’s not linear where higher = worse for you across the entire spectrum.
In the case of exposure of the whole body, a standing ungrounded human adult absorbs RF energy at a maximum rate when the frequency of the RF radiation is in the range of about 70 MHz. This means that the “whole-body” SAR is at a maximum under these conditions. Because of this “resonance” phenomenon and consideration of children and grounded adults, RF safety standards are generally most restrictive in the frequency range of about 30 to 300 MHz.
What about those military things that they use to disperse crowds? Where it makes you feel like your skin is cooking, but it’s actually not. I feel like that uses high power and high frequency radio waves to accomplish that.
This? it says that uses 95ghz which seems to be another frequency that is absorbed well. It’s not just because it’s cb high frequency, there’s specific frequencies that resonate with different things. Also it is definitely cooking your skin and you would be burned if you were hit long enough
Those are 95 GHz but very high power and focused as well.
It’s not that high frequency can’t hurt you, what I’m trying to say is for a given power level, 30-300 MHz is the most risky to humans. That’s why the FCC regulates this band the most stringently.
Yeah, I was 25B cross trained with 25U and the mobile sat dishes needed cordoned off a certain degree area in front to not walk in front of. And the humvvee antennas on high power could burn you if you touched them while transmitting.
That’s a different story. This one is about that time Russia/USSR paid pepsi with old military equipment to get around sanctions. I think they couldn’t actually receive it because they’re not allowed to have that but it’s a funny story regardless. I think someone already posted the link
wccftech.com
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