Now, now…no fat-shaming of the oscillation-challenged gauge bosons.
Stranger
Sector antennae have a radiation pattern that is weakest directly below and directly above. So not so much radiation if you live below one, but also your cell phone reception might by poor. Win some lose some, I guess.
Nope, not at all.
Electromagnetic radiation is a bunch of stuff. On the low end you have long waves which are basically useful for transmitting very slow data rates through polar ice for military submarines but are otherwise basically useless. At higher frequencies you get radio waves, AM radio first and then higher you get the frequencies that broadcast TV and FM radio use. At slightly higher than that you get cell phone frequencies and the frequencies used by wi-fi. At even higher frequencies you get infra-red light that your TV remote uses, then visible light, then ultra-violet light, X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays.
Part way through the ultra-violet part of the spectrum, electromagnetic radiation starts to become “ionizing”, meaning that it’s so high in frequency that it strips the electrons off of atoms and destroys molecules. When most people say the word “radiation” what they really mean is “ionizing radiation”, which is UV light, X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays. These are harmful. There’s a reason the X-ray tech wears heavy lead overalls and hides behind a thick lead wall when they take your X-ray picture.
Lower frequencies like cell phones, FM radio, etc. aren’t harmful. Basically, you’d expect a flashlight to be much more dangerous since the visible light from a flashlight is much higher in frequency. Do you panic if someone shines a flashlight on you? Of course not. So there’s no reason to panic being next to a cell phone antenna.
Your microwave oven happens to use roughly the same frequency as cell phones, cordless phones, and wi-fi. The frequency isn’t dangerous. Like I said, it’s safer than the light from a flashlight. But if you were foolish enough to stand in front of a huge spotlight, you’d get cooked. If you take a magnifying glass and focus the visible light from the sun, you can cook ants. Same thing with radio waves, get too much of them and they can cook you. That’s how your microwave oven works.
Cell phone antennas are fairly low in power. They don’t have enough energy to cook you, so they are safe.
To put it in perspective, your body is safer in the apartments behind those antennas than it is on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building during the day. Sunlight contains UV light, which damages your skin cells. Radio waves don’t harm you. If you want to do less damage to yourself, get out of the sunlight and go into the apartments behind those antennas. It’s safer inside.
Leave something plastic out in the sun for a while. It will probably fade. That’s the ionizing radiation from the sunlight (mostly UV) that’s destroying the plastic. Take that same piece of plastic and put it right behind one of those cell phone antennas. Come back in a few years. Nothing will happen to the plastic. It won’t fade. Radio waves aren’t ionizing. They don’t rip apart atoms.
Cell phone “radiation” isn’t ionizing radiation. It’s not “radiation” in the sense that most people use the word. It’s just electromagnetic radiation, like the light from a flashlight. If cell phone radiation were dangerous, then flashlights would kill, since they are even higher in frequency. Flashlights obviously don’t kill, so don’t worry about cell phone antennas.
Ultra-violet radiation damages your skin. Most skin cancers are caused by UV light from the sun. X-rays and gamma rays penetrate further into your body than UV rays and cause cancers deep inside your body. Everything below UV is non-ionizing, so it’s safe. Everything UV and above is dangerous. That’s the dividing line.
Yes, don’t get antsy unless you live across the street from a southerner with a weird hobby.
Minor nitpick about an otherwise magnificent post. Skin cancer is caused (in general) by a series of cellular mutations including those about replication, telomerase, and apoptosis. These mutations in turn are caused by cellular damage, which is (very often!) caused by UV light, but can come from any number of carcinogenic exposes. UV is the most common because, well, you have a lot of skin surface area, and if you’re outside with no protection you gave a lot of area exposed to said damage.
I am absolutely positive that ECG was aware of all of this, and was simplifying for the sake of an already long post, but Cancer is a personal bug-a-boo of mine, and most people treat it like a disease that we can just ‘cure’ when it’s so much more complicated in most variants.
/rant off.
The thing about ionizing radiation is that the short wavelengths – UV, X-rays, gamma radiation – tend to be highly directional. A cell/radio tower sprays out radiation that is much less directional, hence, not ionizing. Microwaves heat up food by affecting the polarity of water molecules but do so by means of high intensity constructive interference, which is kind of the opposite of what cell toners do.
The directionality of it has nothing to do with it being ionizing or not. Police radar for example has a fairly narrow beam, but is not ionizing. It’s also only a few milliwatts, so it can’t cook you either. You can stand in front of a police radar gun and it won’t hurt you.
It’s the frequency that determines whether it is ionizing or not. The change happens part way through the ultra-violet part of the EM spectrum.
Also, if you have a chunk of Cobalt 60, that’s going to give off gamma radiation (mostly, plus some other stuff) in all directions. Gamma radiation is ionizing, and in this case is not at all directional. When Cobalt 60 is used for radiation therapy, it is used in conjunction with a collimator so that you end up with radiation that is directional and only goes where you want it to go.
Collimators can also be used in X-ray machines, depending on how the X-rays are generated. A directional X-ray machine can be made out of a non-directional source combined with a collimator to make it directional. If you are doing X-ray imaging you need the X-rays emitted by the machine to be directional, but the X-ray source itself might not be. Either way, X-rays are always ionizing.
I have not been aware that oscillation-challenged gauge bosons are a protected class now.
We have been working ceaselessly to end discrimination against Mu and Tau Fermions. Equal rights for antimatter, though, that may be too high-charged of an issue – it is just too easy to pre-judge a particle based on the color of its quarks.
Well, wouldn’t UV photons be safer (less iodizing) farther up into the UV spectrum if we just build our atoms and molecules with fatter, heavier electrons?
When it comes to radiation I like to ask if people are afraid of bicycle wheels. After all, the spokes radiate from the hub.
I got a finger caught in a spinning hie wheel once and twisted it something fierce. Radiation is no joke!
Stranger
You really should use a safety guard on your hie. It is just basic common sense.
And OP is about building antennas. Consider the even greater dangers in building bicycle wheels.