Health risks with radio transmission?

[chebyshevF]

Ok I've done my research and so long as the transmitter isn't outputting at a high level of power, you'll be fine.

Why I ask is because I'm looking into getting a job with a small company, where they install network elements such as optical and radio transmissoin (and multiplexers). Now I know they wouldn't even be advertising if the job involved any health risks, but I remember reading this article a while ago and it's got me thinking: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/vatican-radio-still-making-waves

 

[russ_watters]

As it says in the article, the sample is too small to really support that conclusion.

 

[Jiggy-Ninja]

"Doing an epidemiology study in a small area, dealing with a rare disease, is a mission impossible," he says.

Straight from the article.

My heuristic is the following:

From a physical standpoint, there is no fundamental difference between radio wave and visible light; the only difference is frequency (energy).

High energy (high frequency) radiation, such as UV, X-rays, and so on, are provably dangerous to your health. Lower energy (lower frequency) radiation, such as visible light, is not. After all, you don't worry about cancer sitting under a bank of several dozen incandescent light bulbs.

Radio waves are at a far lower frequency than visible light, in the gigahertz range at the most, visible light is several hundred terahertz. By that reasoning, a radio antenna should be several thousand times safer to be exposed to than a normal light bulb.

The power of the antenna doesn't even matter. Increasing the power just throws more photons at you, it doesn't make them more dangerous. Unless it's really, REALLY powerful. Anything goes if you're throwing several dozen kilowatts at something.

Just because something is invisible does not make it magical.

 

[Bob S]

Don't stick your hand in a microwave oven (2450 MHz) or stand near a high power microwave antenna. You can get cooked. There are microwave electric field meters you can use to test the electric field strength.

Many years ago (1960) I built an AM transmitter with the antenna in the attic. I could walk along the antenna with a fluorescent bulb and it would light up at nodes. I do have health problems now, but not due to RF electric fields.

Bob S

 

[sophiecentaur]

Don't stick your hand in a microwave oven (2450 MHz) or stand near a high power microwave antenna. You can get cooked. There are microwave electric field meters you can use to test the electric field strength.

Many years ago (1960) I built an AM transmitter with the antenna in the attic. I could walk along the antenna with a fluorescent bulb and it would light up at nodes. I do have health problems now, but not due to RF electric fields.

Bob S

The local E field around a transmitter does not equate to the actual power radiated or even to the effective heating of a nearby body because the impedance can be very high. You don't need a lot of power ti make a fluo tube glow so you were probably not in any mortal danger.

 

[Jiggy-Ninja]

Don't stick your hand in a microwave oven (2450 MHz) or stand near a high power microwave antenna. You can get cooked. There are microwave electric field meters you can use to test the electric field strength.

Many years ago (1960) I built an AM transmitter with the antenna in the attic. I could walk along the antenna with a fluorescent bulb and it would light up at nodes. I do have health problems now, but not due to RF electric fields.

Bob S

For some perspective though, a microwave oven is usually throwing several hundred watts of concentrated power at your food. You'd need to be standing fairly close to a several kilowatt radio transmitter that was at exactly the right frequency to get the same effect.

 

[sophiecentaur]

That frequency band would not be very suitable for communications for the same reason that it is good for ovens- the fact that it is absorbed by water vapour. So you may not find many such transmitters.

 

[skeptic2]

The absorbance of radiation by water vapor is not strong at the frequency used by microwave ovens. This may sound counter intuitive as it is mainly the water in the food that is heated by the oven. However if this were the case most of the energy of the microwaves would be absorbed at the surface of the food and the center of the food would be left cold.

http://www.rfcafe.com/references/electrical/atm-absorption.htm

 

[sophiecentaur]

Oh yes. Another 'fact' bites the dust. It's not a resonant absoption.
But it is true to say that water absorbs so much that the heating doesn't penetrate 'wet' food by more than a couple of cms. Food with not much water in it will burn internally and, because ice doesn't absorb much either, you can see standing waves in the melted regions inside an icecream block.
My Panasonic uwave oven uses 'Chaos' which allows faster defrosting by giving random short bursts of high power rather than just using low power. The 2.54GHz gets well inside frozen food but will produce hotspots if max power is used for long. Hence 'chaos' - and it sounds so sexy too, as a selling point.