'Radio GaGa'
Tormented by Tetra.....
The Pork Bolter
No 60, April 2004
http://www.eco-action.org/porkbolter/apr04.html
LIFE has become a nightmare for dozens of Worthing families, thanks to a sinister new police communications mast put up at Worthing Football Club’s ground in Woodside Road. The Tetra (Terrestial Trunked Radio) system uses low frequency radiation, of the kind developed during the Cold War as a crowd-control type weapon! Headaches, sleep deprivation and various illnesses have affected people living in the area ever since the Tetra mast started transmitting at the end of February. Said one resident, Andy Davidson: "I have not slept since the Worthing mast was switched on. I can sleep for 2 hours but wake up as if it is the start of the day. I never get any value sleep from the REM phase. I am so very, very tired." But despite a series of high-profile meetings, protests and media reports, there is no sign that anything is actually going to be done to halt this microwave menace.
Worthing is not an isolated instance. A wave of grassroots protest at the controversial Tetra system has been sweeping across the South of England over the last few months. Local groups have been springing up all over the place, with pressure mounting on councils to deny the masts planning permission. In some instances, O2 Airwave has been found to have put up masts without permission, or by exploiting legal loopholes, in its rush to pick up the £3 billion it’s getting from the government contract. In Rogate, West Sussex, residents staged a vigil to stop a Tetra mast being turned on.
And here in Worthing residents have demonstrated outside the Town Hall and picketed the town centre shop run by 02 - formerly BT Cellnet - calling on the public to boycott its products. Said a campaigner: "There is real concern and anger, particularly among the people unfortunate enough to live right next to the Tetra mast, which is in the middle of a high-density residential area. "They know the mast has been switched on and is beaming something into their homes, because their TV reception went the day the mast was turned on and things like baby monitors aren’t working any more. And people are wondering what those signals are doing to their bodies. At a meeting on March 4 several residents revealed they had been having identical health problems -
sleep disturbances, headaches, itchiness and children suffering nosebleeds." Researchers from the Protect Sussex From Tetra campaign have pointed out the Tetra signal operates using a signal component at 17.6Hz, very close to ‘beta’ brainwaves at around 16Hz. The beta waves are those used by the brain during its waking phase, thus probably explaining the sleep disturbance.
Needless to say, O2 Airwave is taking the usual responsible corporate line of denying anything is wrong with its system at all. It claims people are imagining their illnesses and tells people complaining of TV interference that they should buy more up-to-date sets - even though some of those affected have brand-new equipment. Meanwhile, official bodies like OFCOM and local police authorities are also unsympathetic - but then that’s hardly surprising when it was the government that engineered the whole deal, cashing in by selling the current police frequencies to the mobile phone industry. Once again,
big profits for big players come before little people and their insignificant little lives.
www.tetrawatch.net
www.worthingnotetra.org.uk
www.protectsussexfromtetra.org.uk
www.no2tetra.org
www.mastsanity.org.uk
www.powerwatch.co.uk
The Pork Bolter
No 60, April 2004
http://www.eco-action.org/porkbolter/apr04.html LIFE has become a nightmare for dozens of Worthing families, thanks to a sinister new police communications mast put up at Worthing Football Club’s ground in Woodside Road. The Tetra (Terrestial Trunked Radio) system uses low frequency radiation, of the kind developed during the Cold War as a crowd-control type weapon! Headaches, sleep deprivation and various illnesses have affected people living in the area ever since the Tetra mast started transmitting at the end of February. Said one resident, Andy Davidson: "I have not slept since the Worthing mast was switched on. I can sleep for 2 hours but wake up as if it is the start of the day. I never get any value sleep from the REM phase. I am so very, very tired." But despite a series of high-profile meetings, protests and media reports, there is no sign that anything is actually going to be done to halt this microwave menace.
Worthing is not an isolated instance. A wave of grassroots protest at the controversial Tetra system has been sweeping across the South of England over the last few months. Local groups have been springing up all over the place, with pressure mounting on councils to deny the masts planning permission. In some instances, O2 Airwave has been found to have put up masts without permission, or by exploiting legal loopholes, in its rush to pick up the £3 billion it’s getting from the government contract. In Rogate, West Sussex, residents staged a vigil to stop a Tetra mast being turned on.
And here in Worthing residents have demonstrated outside the Town Hall and picketed the town centre shop run by 02 - formerly BT Cellnet - calling on the public to boycott its products. Said a campaigner: "There is real concern and anger, particularly among the people unfortunate enough to live right next to the Tetra mast, which is in the middle of a high-density residential area. "They know the mast has been switched on and is beaming something into their homes, because their TV reception went the day the mast was turned on and things like baby monitors aren’t working any more. And people are wondering what those signals are doing to their bodies. At a meeting on March 4 several residents revealed they had been having identical health problems -
sleep disturbances, headaches, itchiness and children suffering nosebleeds." Researchers from the Protect Sussex From Tetra campaign have pointed out the Tetra signal operates using a signal component at 17.6Hz, very close to ‘beta’ brainwaves at around 16Hz. The beta waves are those used by the brain during its waking phase, thus probably explaining the sleep disturbance.
Needless to say, O2 Airwave is taking the usual responsible corporate line of denying anything is wrong with its system at all. It claims people are imagining their illnesses and tells people complaining of TV interference that they should buy more up-to-date sets - even though some of those affected have brand-new equipment. Meanwhile, official bodies like OFCOM and local police authorities are also unsympathetic - but then that’s hardly surprising when it was the government that engineered the whole deal, cashing in by selling the current police frequencies to the mobile phone industry. Once again,
big profits for big players come before little people and their insignificant little lives.
www.tetrawatch.net
www.worthingnotetra.org.uk
www.protectsussexfromtetra.org.uk
www.no2tetra.org
www.mastsanity.org.uk
www.powerwatch.co.uk
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Comments
Hide the following 8 comments
i live
01.10.2007 18:42
homer
homer
02.10.2007 09:49
The German government recently warned against WiFi:
Danny
three.... two.... one....
02.10.2007 10:52
"Tiiiiimmmmmbbberrrrrrrrrrrr"
Jack Lumber
Check your facts before you write such total garbage!
02.10.2007 17:44
Absolute nonsense. Tetra operates at around 370MHz - bog-standard UHF radio waves, not "low frequency radiation". The older analogue police radios operated on around 450MHz. Television transmitters operate around 470 - 860MHz but at much higher powers. Any supposed health effects caused by Tetra would have applied equally to the older Police radios, and to a far greater extent with TV transmitters.
How do you expect to be taken seriously if you can't get your most basic of facts right?
R.F. Engineer
Health surveillance
03.10.2007 14:16
Mike
Health Surveillance
03.10.2007 17:16
for a study re police usage of handsets and
for a study about exposure to base station emissions. Follows a recently published study on GSM and 3G mobile phone masts.
I think its undoubtedly true that a small proportion of the population do suffer from something they have termed electromagnetic hypersensitivity EHS or just electro-sensitivity. However, the symptoms most often reported - headaches, sleep disorders, nausea, tingling skin, loss of concentration, can all be attributed to GAD or Generalised Anxiety Disorder or stress. The symptoms frequently appear only after the subject becomes aware that there is a new source of electromagnetic radiation in their neighbourhood and there are several reports of people complaining about both health effects and television interference from masts that have not yet been switched on. The Airwave TETRA network has been operational in most areas of the GB mainland for 4 years now - and it was not the first TETRA system in the UK. That started in 1996. Meanwhile the schools with masts nearby are not empty and doctors waiting rooms are not full of people with unexplained symptoms.
Cheers
Sparky
Sparky
e-mail:
spky999@aol.com
symptomatic
03.10.2007 23:46
Doubtless you are correct. However, I know of people who can tell when an electrical appliance is turned off or on, from the other end of the house. It has a painful and immediate effect on them. They have to live in garden sheds or as luddite-hermits to avoid this.
If you think about it, some people will be more sensitive than others to this sort of EM spike. Myself, I don't feel that, but I do literally feel strong EM fields, they do wear me down after a few hours exposure. We are electromagnetic creatures. While this may seem like anectdotal evidence to you I hope it suggests genuinely independent epidemogical research is required.
Isn't it suspicious that Sweden, Germany and California have regulations and statistics about this illness while we still deny it ?
Danny
But Airwave isn't the first !
04.10.2007 18:31
D700