"Michael Coslo" wrote in message
...
JB wrote:

After reading 1/4 of the "Biological studies..." it is interesting. But
we
need to remember that experiments only become valid when repeated
numerous
times. As these are only summaries, they are hard to compare and we
loose
that without having the full experiment laid out before us. I have
tended
to throw away those that didn't describe the frequency and field
strength in
some way as less than anecdotal.


I'm still not convinced that use of tobacco products are bad for you,
and I've got scientific evidence from tobacco industry lawyers to back
me up. ;^) No relation to this issue except there are people who stand
to profit by both being harmless.


There is always the question of how many studies it takes to make
something "real". I always like to mention the book from the 1870's that
mentions how smoking causes lung cancer; chewing causes oral cancer. But
it wasn't until almost a hundred years later that it really did, because
it took that long to be "proven".

All we can do is make an informed guess, and stick with it. I choose to
limit my cell phone use.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -

One way to tell is by looking around you to see how those around you are
being affected. Perhaps the MEDIA causes the most brain damage on the
planet by spreading madness on grand scales. I can point to a whole lot of
people who WERE harmed in so many ways by Tobacco products. I can only
point to ONE who has been harmed by RF. The guy leaned up against an
inverted V and grabbed on to it. Probably 5kw and it killed a line in his
palm. It did completely heal though. Still I wouldn't consider a ban on
either, as long as the user can keep it from costing or endangering me.
Don't forget there is a political agenda to do away with a lot of things.
The RF hazard thing is based on a minor risk blown out of proportion by
those whose million dollar views were spoiled by transmitter sites. If it
weren't for well funded environmental lobbyists, the FCC wouldn't have been
pressured into cutting exposure limits to half from what was learned by
military studies in the 40's to the 60's and established in the 70's and cut
to half of that in the 80's and finally made into law for hams and cut in
half again for nervous people who still can't point to anything more
concrete than the old military studies. Those same people had oil
production cut in this country so that now you have to pay $4 a gallon. Who
profits isn't always the point. Some people have to be vindicated even if
it comes all out of someone else's pocket.

BTW I don't even own a cell phone. I have had them but they are too much
of a distraction.

JB wrote:

... The guy leaned up against an
inverted V and grabbed on to it. Probably 5kw and it killed a line in his
palm. It did completely heal though. ...
...
BTW I don't even own a cell phone. I have had them but they are too much
of a distraction.



I developed a liking to high power at an early age ... also, brought my
fingers within too close a distance to a plate cap of large transmitting
tube at this time ... all it took was one hole completely though my
finger to gain a HIGH appreciation for caution around high power RF ...

I would like to tell you this single lesson was enough for me -- it
wasn't ... still, I eventually learned.

Now you know two stupid guys. ;-)

Regards,
JS

JB wrote:
"Michael Coslo" wrote in message
...
JB wrote:

After reading 1/4 of the "Biological studies..." it is interesting. But
we
need to remember that experiments only become valid when repeated
numerous
times. As these are only summaries, they are hard to compare and we
loose
that without having the full experiment laid out before us. I have
tended
to throw away those that didn't describe the frequency and field
strength in
some way as less than anecdotal.

I'm still not convinced that use of tobacco products are bad for you,
and I've got scientific evidence from tobacco industry lawyers to back
me up. ;^) No relation to this issue except there are people who stand
to profit by both being harmless.


There is always the question of how many studies it takes to make
something "real". I always like to mention the book from the 1870's that
mentions how smoking causes lung cancer; chewing causes oral cancer. But
it wasn't until almost a hundred years later that it really did, because
it took that long to be "proven".

All we can do is make an informed guess, and stick with it. I choose to
limit my cell phone use.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -

One way to tell is by looking around you to see how those around you are
being affected. Perhaps the MEDIA causes the most brain damage on the
planet by spreading madness on grand scales.

I'vve always thought we get the media we deserve.....




I can point to a whole lot of
people who WERE harmed in so many ways by Tobacco products. I can only
point to ONE who has been harmed by RF. The guy leaned up against an
inverted V and grabbed on to it. Probably 5kw and it killed a line in his
palm. It did completely heal though.

Ouch! I was hit once with about 50 watts. One of my first antennas was
a random wire, and RF was coupled to the metal ring around the tuning
cap on my matchbox. Hurt something awful, put a hole in my finger, and
there was even a little smoke. That guy must have really hurt.

Who was it here that told about birds landing on ladder line and
getting zapped. leaving only their feet wrapped around the line?



Still I wouldn't consider a ban on
either, as long as the user can keep it from costing or endangering me.
Don't forget there is a political agenda to do away with a lot of things.
The RF hazard thing is based on a minor risk blown out of proportion by
those whose million dollar views were spoiled by transmitter sites.

Well, that is one of the reasons. We sometimes tend to focus pretty
narrowly. That some of these folk don't like much of anything is pretty
spot on. But we shouldn't carry that over as blanket condemnation. Its
like blaming the little old lady sitting at home drinking her sherry
with binge drinking college students.


If it
weren't for well funded environmental lobbyists,
the FCC wouldn't have been
pressured into cutting exposure limits to half from what was learned by
military studies in the 40's to the 60's and established in the 70's and cut
to half of that in the 80's and finally made into law for hams and cut in
half again for nervous people who still can't point to anything more
concrete than the old military studies.

There have been lots of studies since then.


Those same people had oil
production cut in this country so that now you have to pay $4 a gallon.

The supply/demand effects of our oil production via offshore, or unused
interior drilling, are not responsible for the prices we are paying now.
There is a combination of massive demand by the developing countries,
large demand by ourselves, and rampant speculation.

There is also the issue of we really only have so much oil. And we've
used most of it (unless you ascribe to the abiotic oil theory)

Don't discount the possibility of sitting on reserves. In our area,
there were gas and oil wells drilled between 25 years ago, and the
present. Most of them sat, some to the point of needing new caps put on
the wells because the old ones got rusty. But there are many hundreds,
perhaps thousands of wells there. As we speak, there are new pipelines
being put in to bring the stuff to market. Simply when the price became
right, the supply was "uncorked". And it looks like there is a lot of
it. More gas than oil, but still significant.

Not a liberal or a tree hugger in the mix. Just good old supply and demand.


You want to point fingers? There has been a bubble of shady speculation
running through the business world. A few years back, it was the Dot.com
bubble. then it was the criminally innovative accounting practices that
burst Enron and World.com into the news. Then it was the real estate
issue, with loans so bad that some of these people were folding back
their interest payments into their principal. That is insanity. How on
earth could such a thing be allowed or legal? But the people originating
the loans had not reason not to. They got their commission, and the loan
was immediately sold to some other institution, who would then play a
game of "hot potato", whoever was holding the mortgage when it defaulted
was the loser. Interesting that the gasoline prices went haywire so soon
after the real estate markets collapsed. These folk (a very loose
aggregation, but certainly a trend) just moved from one form of
speculation to another.

Speculation is and should be a good thing, allowing money to be put into
risky and unproven fields. But it can be taken too far. See the above.


BTW I don't even own a cell phone. I have had them but they are too much
of a distraction.

I'd rather not, but I have to.. 8^(

- 73 de Mike N3LI -

Michael Coslo wrote:
JB wrote:

If it
weren't for well funded environmental lobbyists,
the FCC wouldn't have been
pressured into cutting exposure limits to half from what was learned by
military studies in the 40's to the 60's and established in the 70's
and cut
to half of that in the 80's and finally made into law for hams and cut in
half again for nervous people who still can't point to anything more
concrete than the old military studies.

There have been lots of studies since then.


I would suggest taking a look at the latest IEEE/ANSI standard for
exposure. The actual limits in the standard only take a few pages. The
other 100 pages is the critical analysis of the hundreds of studies with
respect to every effect one can imagine, and then some.

As Michael points out, there's been a LOT of studies in the last few
years (driving, for instance, a change from field strength limits to SAR
limits in some cases)

What the standard and accompanying analysis makes very clear, though, is
that there is no way to "prove a negative": i.e. there is no way to
"prove" that a particular EM field exposure doesn't have any long term
effects. All you can do is say that there is no known mechanism by
which such an effect can be produced, or that if it does exist, there's
no way to measure it in a statistically significant way, or, in some
cases, that greater exposures have been shown experimentally to have no
moderate term effects (e.g. nobody's done a longitudinal study lasting
30-40 years that's been controlled for other confounding effects).

What you CAN say is that the studies prompting the early alarmist
literature (e.g. "currents of death", "VDTs cause miscarriage") have
severe methodological or statistical problems. Unfortunately, those
early studies have been (poorly) abstracted and summarized many times
and the caveats in the original paper, or subsequent better studies, are
ignored.

Particularly in non-technical trade literature (e.g. trade magazines
aimed at, for example, small business owners), the author of an article
writing about minimizing hazards in the workplace might not actually
know very much about the details of the hazards, nor do a whole lot of
research beyond what's in Wikipedia or copied from some other trade
magazine. They certainly don't go back to the original source, nor do
they look at current standards, etc. I still run across articles that
(indirectly) cite the famous (and totally misinterpreted) Kaiser VDT
study from 1981/1982, published in 1988. While that study found a
correlation, one has to remember correlation is not causation. Someone
googling VDT and miscarriage will no doubt turn up articles in the NY
Times from 1988, for instance, but not pay attention to the fact that
the article is 20 years old, because, on the web, the date is tiny print
and grey.

Jim Lux wrote:


What you CAN say is that the studies prompting the early alarmist
literature (e.g. "currents of death", "VDTs cause miscarriage") have
severe methodological or statistical problems. Unfortunately, those
early studies have been (poorly) abstracted and summarized many times
and the caveats in the original paper, or subsequent better studies, are
ignored.


Absolutely. I am not at all afraid to use my cell phone in moderation.
It isn't going to make me drop over or faint - unless Ed McMahon calls
me about my PCH prize.

The issue to me is that we are seeing some effects that are more subtle
than nasty diseases or imminent death. Those early and poorly done
studies did not help for sure.

But you can see out on the roads - something is happening. There are
stone sober people who are driving like drunken people. Their reaction
times are bad, they make poor decisions they have trouble staying in
their lane, they drive through red lights and remain stopped at green
lights.

Some of the excuses given for this behavior just don't wash if you ask
me. Things like driving distracted, while plausible, have a niggling
problem. People like the police and Ham radio operators and plenty of
other folk use radios daily, yet when was the last time that you heard
about say a State Forest Ranger getting in an accident because he was
using the radio?

Many of these cell users survive on the good graces of other drivers
looking out for them, and avoiding them. Whereas once I would look at
the cars around me in a general fashion, I now zero in on the driver to
see if they are talking on their cell, or even worse, texting, I then
chart my course to separate myself from them as far as possible. Problem
is, there are too many of them on many local roads, and those places I
just avoid.

But I think is is just plain sad that we have to drive with impaired
drives every day.

The thing I find odd is that this behavior is verifiable and
widespread, and yet to point it out and ask the question "Is there
something going on here?" gets one labeled a kook.

And yet, if these very same drivers were driving intoxicated and killing
and injuring people, there would be the same old hue and cry. Is a
person killed by a drunk driver more dead than one killed by one using a
cell phone, and driving the same way as the drunk guy?

As the comedian once said "Drive carefully on the way home folks - it
only counts if you get killed during the holidays!"

- 73 de Mike N3LI -

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:41:20 -0400, Michael Coslo
wrote:

People like the police and Ham radio operators and plenty of
other folk use radios daily, yet when was the last time that you heard
about say a State Forest Ranger getting in an accident because he was
using the radio?

Hi Mike,

Am I the only one to recall that time when it was AGAINST THE LAW to
operate a ham radio while driving for EXACTLY THE SAME REASONS you
have witnessed with cell phone users poor driving performance? Having
a rig in the car came with the legal distinction of operating mobile
and operating remote. I've lived in states where you could only
operate remote, and it was against the law to operate mobile. Consult
old copies of the Ham rags for various campaigns to change the laws
(even to operating remote).

If the laws changed at all, it wasn't because of our legislative clout
so much as it was the telephone company's.

Ham radio operators behind the wheel and engaged in a QSO exhibit no
greater care than the ordinary driver on the cell phone.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Richard Clark wrote:
Ham radio operators behind the wheel and engaged in a QSO exhibit no
greater care than the ordinary driver on the cell phone.

My half-duplex ham radio seems less distracting
than my full-duplex cell phone that I have to
hold to my ear and mouth at the same time.
--
73, Cecil http://www.w5dxp.com

Cecil Moore wrote:
Richard Clark wrote:
Ham radio operators behind the wheel and engaged in a QSO exhibit no
greater care than the ordinary driver on the cell phone.

I don't find that to be the case at all. Either for myself, or for
others I've discussed the issue with.

My half-duplex ham radio seems less distracting
than my full-duplex cell phone that I have to
hold to my ear and mouth at the same time.

I agree with Cecil, I find radio QSO's to be *much* less distracting
than cell phone conversations. I think there are a couple of reasons
for that.

1) Cell phones usually are only in one ear, even with a hands free
headset. I find it takes considerably more concentration to process
audio that is delivered in that fashion and most of the other folks
I've compared notes with find that also. The cabin filling audio of
the radio speaker which is heard by both ears is much easier to get
information from.

2) I think there is a different cultural meme about telephone
conversations vs radio conversations. I think most of us grow up using
a phone in a household where we tend to turn inwards and pay attention
to the call and isolate ourselves from the room full of distractions
(TV, other conversations, etc). I think that's reinforced by the
relatively low audio level in the handset which tends not to overpower
the local environment's noises, you pretty much have to focus on the
conversation on the phone and we learn that behavior. I believe that
'phone' behavior is carried over into cell phone usage, and mobile
cell phone usage where it's obviously not a good thing. In contrast
most folks have QSO's with room filling audio and a whole different
paradigm for how they interact with a 'radio' device as opposed to a
'telephone' device. I suspect that part of the popularity of the Push
To Talk services offered by some cell companies is because they break
that 'phone device' paradigm.

3) The conversations themselves might command more attention. It's one
thing to be chatting with my buddies on the radio, if I drop out of
the conversation to pay attention to traffic or whatever, there are no
repercussions. On the other hand, a business phone call may command a
lot more of my attention - if my boss has gone to the trouble of
tracking me down on my cell, it's likely the call carries more weight
than a casual conversation with friends. That alone will cause me to
invest more attention resources to dealing with it than I will for a
radio conversation, with whatever collateral effects on my
concentration for driving. If I'm trying to think about a problem and
do remote troubleshooting via phone, it's even worse and I better pull
over (and do).

I find that all three of these factors combine to make a cell phone
call much different than a radio conversation in terms of how it
impacts my situational awareness while driving (or flying). While
flying it's often the case that I'm listening to two different
conversations on two radios (tower and ATC) to piece together a
picture of what's going on in the airspace I'm in, and even that is
less attention grabbing than a cell call.

YMMV

73 de Kevin, WB2EMS

Richard Clark wrote:

Am I the only one to recall that time when it was AGAINST THE LAW to
operate a ham radio while driving for EXACTLY THE SAME REASONS you
have witnessed with cell phone users poor driving performance?

Actually I don't, but okay.

Does it therefore follow that because those reasons turned out to be
wrong for operating Ham radio mobile that they are wrong for cell
phones? Despite the differences.

One of the more amusing aspects of DUIC driving is the slippery sloping
done by people. Equivalents are attempted to assure us that cell phones
are as safe as anything else because, hey, eating or drinking coffee is
a distraction, and just talking to the person beside you is a
distraction also. So the argument goes, you shouldn't discourage cell
phone use because then you would have to ban eating, drinking and
talking to anyone in the car.


Ham radio operators behind the wheel and engaged in a QSO exhibit no
greater care than the ordinary driver on the cell phone.


I would respectfully disagree there Richard. I'm nearly struck nearly
every day by someone operating mobile. I haven't kept count, but over
the years it's been possibly over a thousand times. You would think by
now, one or two of them would have been Hams operating mobile. We have a
very active Ham population around here, and the local repeaters are
constantly in use.

(note that my off the cuff "stats" are compiled for both personal
driving and pedestrian incidents and observed ones. Even if my figures
are exaggerated by faulty memory, I've never been in a collision or near
collision with a Ham during operation, or a truck driver while s/he was
using a CB. Same goes for law enforcement and various communication
vehicles.



- 73 de Mike N3LI -

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:25:47 -0400, Michael Coslo
wrote:

Ham radio operators behind the wheel and engaged in a QSO exhibit no
greater care than the ordinary driver on the cell phone.


I would respectfully disagree there Richard. I'm nearly struck nearly
every day by someone operating mobile.

And so do others, all probably cell-phone users too. I challenge
anyone to replace QSO with conversation and Rig with Cell-phone and
notice 200 million cell-phone user's claim to driving perfection while
talking.

The count of those you've seen operating dangerously could expand to
make a line stretching along the equator - each claiming with as much
gusto to have never presented a risk and swearing at ham radio
operators as driving impaired.

The fact remains that the current complaint about cell-phone users
behind the wheel ealier provided the identical logic for enforcing a
ban against Ham radio mobile operation. Only two things have changed:
the law, and the number of mobile operators of both classes. What has
not changed is poor performance. There is nothing inherent about Ham
mobile operation that is safer than cell-phone use and claims to the
contrary are self serving.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC