Now Swedish researchers have conducted a study that the heavy use of cell phones cause brain tumors. I have always been suspect of past studies as I am very familiar with how radio frequency equipment works and know that placing a transmitter next to your head and putting out radio waves, no matter how small the wattage is, could have an effect.
Anyway I lost my stepfather back in 1974 to a brain tumor. He, like myself was a US Navy electronics technician for 24 years, but he started back in the days when they were still finding out about the effects of radio frequencies on the body.
By the time I came in, before you could even go work on an antenna, you had to run a man aloft chit (permission to go up the mast). You did this not just on your ship, but other ships on the pier. You had to tag out and secure all equipment listed as possibly harmful to personnel. All of these safety measures were put in place to protect people from the effects of microwave energy.
Even with all the protection offered, some unofficial research we did around the shop a couple of months kind of surprized us a bit. We were wondering why the majority of kids we have are girls, and were wondering if it had anything to do with our chosen profession, and it all basically started as a joke.
Where I work we have about 15 Ultra High Frequency Transceivers (225 MHZ to 399.975 MHZ) in our lab. While we have them all terminated into dummy loads, not all of the energy is disapated by the dummy loads. In fact we use that to our advantage when we want to do back to back checks. We just sit the dummy loads next to one another and can talk from radio to radio.
We also like to listen to the FM commercial radio when we are in lab and we get great reception when we are doing static (not energized) labs. When we are doing dynamic (operational) labs, trying to get a clear FM channel is very difficult due to the bleedover from the transceivers.
We were joking around one day about the fact that we were glad we all did not want any more kids, because of all the residual radiation and then wondered if it really had an effect.
Our unscientific research had us looking at who had boys, who had girls, and when we had them. What we found out was when we were on shore duty in a non-radio frequency environment we had boys, but when we were on sea duty almost all of us had girls. It may just be a coincidence, but it made us think.
Anyway, knowing that a cell phone is like a small microwave transmitter and is very low power, but it is still a microwave device. The power in a microwave oven is not what cooks the food. It is the frequency of the radio waves.
A microwave is a really high frequency alternating waveform. By that I mean it rapidly changes polarity. My microwave oven for instance operates at 2450 MHZ. That means that the waveform changes polarity every .0000000000408 seconds. That is pretty fast and the friction caused by the polarity shifts is what cooks things from the inside out.
While cell phones in the United States operate at lower frequencies from 824-894 MHZ which is somewhat lower these polarities are still changing at a rate of .00000000121 seconds.
I have always suspected that heavy cell phone use could affect people and now there is finally a study that supports that. Anyway, I seldom have used them, don't own one, and really see no need.
