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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Non-ionizing radiation does not mean harmless radiation. Low power radiation could be quite harmful when exposure in 24x7 for long term. Power levels reduces probability of DNA damage but if exposure is long term then it’s cumulative effect.

People living near cell phone antennas have severe health issues and even phone companies don’t debate this. They are required to put health hazard warning around those antennas for certain perimeter and homes are not allowed to be built close to them. Unfortunately those limits are absolute bare minimum. There huge amount of “research” phone companies have funded to backup these minimum limits and no independent researchers would agree with it. For 5G, numbers of antennas are going to increase by 10X and if you live in city, there is very good chance you are not too far from it.

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If you're talking to a person 1m away from you, both of you can whisper. If you're 50m away, both of you need to shout.

It's similar to radio transmission.

The closer some base station antenna is, the lower the power your smartphone needs to reach the base station. Having many base stations reduces the effective field power.

Modern LTE and 5G also has something that is called beamforming. Instead of shouting in all directions, the base station restricts the radio signal to the direction of the smartphone. Other won't hear the noise.

It's not correct that "faster data" means there's more "EM things" around us. Basically we use the radio transmission more efficiently.

tldr: if you wanna avoid radiation, be close to a base station where powersaving kicks in.

The base station transmits with higher power and much more frequently than your cell phone does (unless you are the only one served by the tower and tx more than rx for some reason). If you are concerned about radiation from telcom / cell, living near a base station is a bad idea.

Citation much needed, for this is contrary to anything I've learned (engineer, have worked with radio and radar systems for years, and the only case that I know that hasn't been debunked was from the crew of an electronic warfare ship.)

I'm not to good with low level stuff but this might go down to the famous wave/particle thing where one of the experiments that supported the particle explanation was that beneath a certain energy the radiation would not ionize a given material, however long they exposed it and however much radiation it was.

(Anyone who knows this better feel free to correct me, this is just what I remember from school when I'm maybe more than twice as old.)

>Non-ionizing radiation does not mean harmless radiation.

Please describe by which mechanism dna molecules are damaged by non ionizing radiation (e.g. a cell phone tower).

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