RadioBanter - BPL NPRM Approved

Old man lennie blabbered:

If all could be summed up that easily, it would be "perfectly legal"
for you to hold a 5 W HT up to the abdomen of a pacemaker wearer
and thumb the PTT switch. Are you licensed by the FCC to
deliberately interfere with anything? I don't think so. We can toss a
coin to see if the pacemaker wearer has an infarc.

And Steve Robeson, K4CAP responded:

"Infarct", Lennie...

Besides...A pacer is not the therapy of choice for a myocardial
infarction. A pacer is placed due to an SA node or other pacer
failure...An ELECTRICAL failure of the heart which may or mayNOT be
due to an MI. An MI is actual damage done to the myocardium, or heart
muscle, usually due to cardiovascular disease or a thrombus of other
etiology, even trauma.

It is very difficult to interfere with today's pacers, and interference
to one isn't going to cause a myocardial infarction. A story about
pacemakers and hams.

A ham friend lived across the street from a person who wore a pacemaker.
The ham had been on the air, on HF and VHF, for some years without even
knowing the across the street neighbor wore the device. The ham had
never had a complaint of any kind of TVI or any other type of
interference from any neighbors. The neighbor purchased a cheap TV and
one day noticed interference, someone told him it might be the ham
across the street. He went to see the ham, the ham took his own portable
TV over to the neighbors and ask the neighbor to use his set for a few
days to see if there was any interference. The ham operated on all HF
bands and his usual VHF frequencies for a couple of days and no
inteference occured to the hams TV but did on the neighbors. The
neighbor was convinced it was his TV and returned it to the store. End
of story right? Not quite. The neighbor, on a visit to his cardiologist,
happened to mention the ham and the inteference problem. The doctor got
all excited and told the patient that that ham's signals could interfer
with his pacemaker and possibly kill him. Now the ham had been operating
for years and there had never been a hint of a problem, but now his
signals may suddenly kill this guy.
On advice of the doctor, the neighbor called the FCC. The FCC got
envolved and came out and made checks and measurements of the hams
stations and gave it a clean bill of health. The neighbor, knowing he
was going to die if the ham operated, was not satisfied and demanded the
FCC put the ham off the air. The FCC refused, so an engineer from the
pacemaker manufacturer was called in. They took an indentical pacemaker,
laid it next to the hams station, strung the leads out, operated the
station at power levels from very low to full legal limit, and was never
able to observe any interference to the pacer from the signals. They
repeated the same test at the neighbors location and no matter what they
tried they could not get the hams signals to interfer with the pacemaker.

That was over 25 years ago. Pacemaker technology has improved vastly
since then. My wife wears a pacemaker and shortly after it was installed
I had a conversation with one of the St. Jude (the manufacturer)
engineers on the subject of interference. He said it would be very
difficult for my ham transmissions to interfere. I ask what would be the
consquencies it it did. His answer was that when the pacer detected any
interference it would simply stop pacing until the interference went
away. The effect on the wearer would be the heart would slow down to
whatever its own pacing rate was (in my wife's case between 30-40 beats
per min), and she would probably feel dizzy, lightheaded, out of breath,
or if her rhythm were slow enough, maybe pass out, but once the
interference is gone, the pacer would pick up and pace her at 70 the
rate it is set for.

So lennieboy, get your facts straight, some ham or any other transmitter
near a pacemaker wearer isn't going to cause them to suffer a heart
attack, as much as you would like to think it would so you could blame
all those nasty hams for killing people. If it were so, then pacemaker
users would be dropping all over the place everytime a police car went
by with the officer on the radio, or when they passed a high power
broadcasting tower or any number of scenarios. They don't even tell
pacer users to beware of microwave ovens anymore.

Now back to you room lennie and let some other resident of the home use
the computer, the nurse is waiting to give you your meds.