Some doubt safety of wireless

The Daily Pennsylvanian ^ | March 14, 2006 | eric chen

[Ptarmigan]

I can't afford all that! :)

[Denver Ditdat]

Originally, I thought that Frederick Gilbert would have no reason to hold a cell phone next to his brain, but then I remembered that he talks out his ass.

LOL! Top post of the thread.

[Uncle Jaque]

Here at WLOB in Portland Maine we don't take any chances...



Oy!; That's a 5K Watt transmission tower right outside of the Studio, fer cryin' out loud!

[Uncle Jaque]

Hey; you think that this is a problem;

Check THIS out!!!:

http://www.wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm

I don't know if this is a hoax or not, but I'm not going to hold a pair of cell phones to either ear and call myself!

Boiled brains; Now that's GOTTA hurt! ~~~**#{8^H

[Intolerant in NJ]

LOL - wish I had had one of them hats fifty years ago - maybe my memory wouldn't be fading so fast now - nahhhh.......

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

6. Phone 'A' will now be talking to Phone 'B' whilst Phone 'B' will be talking to Phone 'A'.

I checked out the link you provided even though I was a bit dubious.
I stopped reading when I reached number 6. By 'mobile phone' I presumed the author was speaking of a cellular phone since he took pains to be clear that this would not work with cordless phones.

Anyone who has such a slippery grasp on the way that cellular phones actually work has to be lying through his teeth when he says he cooked an egg in this fashion.

[Uncle Jaque]

I really don't know enough about the technology to really say one way or another, although it left me a little skeptical as well.

About the only thing that might do it is some sort of harmonic electromagnetic "feedback" between the two transmitting phones, similar to what happens in a microwave oven.

But then again, I doubt that the average cell phone puts out sufficient power to do anything like that.

I did a search on SNOPES to see if they had anything in their hoax & urban myth database on it - they don't, so I emailed the link to them.

This is just the sort of thing that can go crazy on the internet / e-mail (remember the "exploding microwaved coffee" warning that went around a couple of years ago?) so they might want to be on top of it.

If any FReepers are crazy enough to try it, please report your findings back to us, won't ya?

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

The things that made me say ...Pffffft!...to this guys claims (although in retrospect I believe he was simply trying to be funny) were:

1. Cellular phones don't call each other directly. They connnect to the nearest cellular tower where the call is directed to the MTSO (Mobile telephone switching office) of the Local Tel and then sent to the nearest cell tower to the receiving unit to complete the call. (This is a simplistic explanation but essentially correct)

2. The cell tower equipment tells the phone how much power to transit with and it is only at maximum levels for a microsecond or two in order to register with the system. Once that is accomplished, the phone's proximity to the cell tower is the main determining factor for which of 8 power levels the phone is to use.

3. The author uses the figure of "2 watts" in his alleged experiment. This is impossible for the phone he has pictured (which I believe is a Nokia 5100 series handheld).
No mobile phone will ever transmit more than .8 watts (that's 8/10s of a watt) of power in the frequency range it is designed for. The 8 power levels go in descending order from there. Generally, this is at or slightly above 900mHz. Quite a bit less than microwave frequency.

I have years of experience with selling, servicing and repairing all kinds of cellular equipment and have only ever witnessed one instance of a cellular phone transmission interacting in a visible way with its surroundings.
This happened when a friend of mine was finishing the adjustment of an antenna freshly installed on a vehicle.
The cell phone was an installed mobile phone. A technician inside the car decided to make a test call on the phone at the moment my friend was grasping the antenna and his gold wedding ring was in contact with the vertical mast.
The initial registration pulse of these phones goes out at a power level of up to 4 watts.
My friend got quite the little burn mark on his ring finger when that energy was shorted momentarily and was converted to heat. Quite a stream of expletives followed that incident.

Just thought I'd throw in an extra 5 cents worth. Makes me feel that all my education hasn't gone to waste.     =;^)