In the news

Some very noble puns

I was told that if you’re near an Air Force installation and hear clicking in your ears then you’re being hit by an active radar and are effectively being cooked alive. I presume the last part is a slight exaggeration meant to keep young men away from radars, but I’m no expert.

Have a read of this.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/havana-syndrome-skepticism-it-was-probably-psychogenic-by-robert-bartholomew/

I've never encountered a military claim so hotly disputed by medics and weapons specialists. Even now, opinion on whether it is even possible seems split right down the middle

Not really news but I found this McK article interesting, about which low and medium wage jobs lead to better jobs and how. I didn’t finish it so don’t know if/how they address systemic shortcomings or scalability, but it’s food for thought.

https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/covid-response-center/covid-19-impact/impact-on-economies/unlocking-experience-based-job-progressions-for-millions-of-workers?cid=other-eml-dre-mip-mck&hlkid=10c588d9bccd4e79836ce9fcb0bd89c0&hctky=12841194&hdpid=b4b3b38b-d6e8-416c-9c89-a898c8137cc8

It does fit in the tendency of heating up the old cold war again. Or if you like, making the cold war great again. It is more or less in the military's interest to make people believe that the US embassy is under attack. Good old fashioned propaganda, quite an interesting read 👍

I worked on one airfield where every 4 seconds, coincident with the radar head’s rotation, every TV, projector and computer monitor would flicker and every loudspeaker would click. I worked in the tower at another which had a radar head right next to it, level with the visual control room. We were told one day by the engineers that, if it ever stopped rotating and was pointed directly at us, we had 90 seconds to get out.

That's a bit terrifying...

#deathrays4dayz

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777288/

Conclusion:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that occupational exposure to radar microwave radiation leads to changes in somatic symptoms, anxiety and insomnia, social dysfunction, and severe depression. Altogether these results indicate that occupational exposure to radar microwave radiations may be linked to some adverse health effects.

Interesting

insomnia, lol.

In Germany they had to compensate soldiers that worked on F-104 Starfighter radar with the wrong equipment and got cancer.

A decade later he found out that he was not alone. He was one of thousands of soldiers in the German army, the Bundeswehr, who worked with radar equipment in the 1960s and 1970s. Now more than 2,000 of these men have come forward, all with one thing in common: they are seriously ill. Some have brain tumours, others have heart problems. But the most common illness is cancer: skin cancer, intestinal cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer and leukaemia.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/a-race-between-death-and-justice-1.1089599

Bit more ominous that anxiety and insomnia. Yikes

That Havana story always fascinated me.

^ So how does 5G fare in the scheme of things? Genuinely interested.

It does fit in the tendency of heating up the old cold war again. Or if you like, making the cold war great again. It is more or less in the military's interest to make people believe that the US embassy is under attack. Good old fashioned propaganda, quite an interesting read 👍

An international affairs lecturer friend of mine is convinced that the US are spending money on lobbyists and psyops campaigns to make this a more contentious international issue but in the lack of any evidence of this whatsoever I'll just assume that he's wearing a tin foil hat. That said, that sort of stuff does happen all the time so its at least possible.

The science behind high energy microwave and longer wavelength RF exposure is pretty well understood. All sorts of things are possible. From being cooked to getting cancer (in very specific circumstances).

The 5G and Havana Syndrome stuff does not marry with the current scientific view of what is possible. Or so I'm told. I'm not exactly an expert on this shit.

People have been building death rays for years. Its not that Havana Syndrome is definitely impossible, its more that there is very little evidence so far to say that it is a thing.

The second bit always had the whiff of bolleaux about it (I should ask the engineers at my current place), but radars can definitely be bad for you if you’re up close and in the wrong place.

Worth also mentioning that we've been bathed in similar frequencies to 5g for decades without even knowing. There's a blanket of geostationary satellites that use similar frequencies as 5g for downlinks. Emergency service radio networks use point to point Comms on similar frequencies too. Pretty much every cell tower in the UK uses similar frequencies to 5g to form a mesh network.

Edit: Starlink, iridum and inmarsat uses V-band and K-band just like 5G. Wonder if anybody has felt any negative health effects from the starlink constellation yet? :D

AIUI, we spend our existences bathed in RF energy from across the spectrum, from all sorts of cosmic and terrestrial sources, and it’s not a problem until it is too powerful/concentrated. TV, 5G, GPS etc. signals are far too weak to be an issue unless you are right up close to a transmitter.

Edit: Yeah, what you said above ^

unless you are right up close to a transmitter.

When I got my radio amateur license in the 90s there was a whole section on RF safety. Quite easy to get cooked or shocked if you get too close to high power transmissions but we are talking very high indeed. I.e kilowatts. Admittedly problems can happen from regular exposure to medium power transmissions up close.

I used to hear interesting stories from old colleagues and old school broadcast engineers about the effects of 100,000 watt FM transmitters. I am not sure that the whiff of bolleaux was that strong.

Was it the Philadelphia experiment that made a ship disappear with RF / magnetism?

When I was a courier I keyed up my radio next to two computer monitors (green screen ones) both images distorted, one recovered after being turned off and on one never did.

I am not sure that the whiff of bolleaux was that strong.

Here's a calculator to estimate the safe distance to be from an FM transmitter. https://www.fcc.gov/general/fm-model

You have to be pretty close to suffer negative effects. That's one of the reasons that broadcast transmitters are allowed in urban areas such as Crystal Palace

Just entered the details for the Radio 1 transmission at Crystal Palace. The safe distance is roughly 20m from the antenna in terms of EMR.

Inverse square law ftw.
If you want an expert's view on the RF emissions of 5G, this guy knows his RF: https://youtu.be/R0xwyVlqsRo

Inverse square law ftw.

Indeed