[adsfqwop]

> Professor also admonished us that such technicians must always be infinitely certain that the transmitter is not operational at the time of service.

It's a good thing your professor is not a tower technician. No self respecting technician climbs up a tower without knowing his potential exposure.

There is a reason both the US FCC and EU ICNIRP have guidelines for human exposure, and if you are a tower technician you wear a personal RF densitometer to ensure you are not exposed above these levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_RF_safety_monitor

"Electromagnetic field densitometers, as used in the cellular phone industry, are referred as "personal RF safety monitors", personal protection monitors (PPM) or RF exposimeters.[1] They form part of the personal protective equipment worn by a person working in areas exposed to radio spectrum radiation."

And even with a densitometer, when working on high-powered live equipment, you also wear a protective suit:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Nardaler...

I hope you forward this information to your professor. Industrial RF radiation is not something you want to play around with.

[cannedslime]

I saw a video recently where a guy took a densitometer to a street with 5g in my country, and lets just say that there was plenty of sweet spots where it was well over 500uw/m2. Im no expert or anything, but seems like allowing 4 different vendors to put up 5g infrastructure all over the place might not be such a great idea.

[throwaway995669]

I lived in a place where they had many co-located LTE base stations and power density about 1/4 mi away from these exceeded 75 mW/m^2. Now, I get it that a typical wifi base station transmits up to 500mW, but that's a point source and the inverse square law works to your advantage - the total dose in any one direction is minimal.

Not so when it's a huge multi-tier tower - that's your whole body facing the tower getting that dose.

I'm a software engineer, a technologist, by trade and I was in complete denial about this until I started getting serious eczema that only went away when I stopped using wireless gadgets and avoided staying too long in areas with cellular base stations.

I denied and denied and denied but repeated experiments on myself only revealed how my body reacts to this stuff. My ideal power density is less than 1mW/m^2 to not break out. And there seems to be a relationship to what LTE bands the tower is transmitting on - outside the US I seem to do better. It could be the frequency, or could be the modulation.

[torqueTorrent]

hmm your comment makes it sound as if I had said that my professor recommended reckless abandon such that we should climb the tower in swimwear during a heavy rain after cranking the tranmitter to maximum?

[adsfqwop]

Yes it's true. Unfortunately I cannot edit my comment any more. I do apologize, as it seems I actually misinterpreted your comment.

You can erase all references to your professor and swimwear tower climbing from the text. Hats off to him! And again, sorry for the mistake.

[torqueTorrent]

No worries, I reckoned that a misunderstanding must have occurred!

Still, I couldn't resist a vision not unlike the penultimate and electrifying golf scene with Bill Murray & the bishop in Caddyshack.