Subject: Re: [NEXTEL-1] Judge orders Wayland ZBA to allow cell towers

From: Dave Emery <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 17:47:53 -0500

On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 06:02:26AM -0500, Marcel wrote:
> There could be several reasons:
> 
> RF Engineers  typically "Want What They Want" sometimes and are
> difficult to persuade once the design is done. I don't know what freqs
> the town uses but they could be worried about interference issues. Most
> likely Nextel wanted to prove their point on this one.  I'm sure Nextel
> has came up with other solutions during the 10yrs of legal fighting. I
> bet the original RF Engineer is no longer there.
> 
> But , I maybe wrong.............
> 
> Bill Smith wrote:
> 
> > The Town has a 60 foot Monopole behind thePublicSafetyBuilding right
> > in the center.  I’m surprised they didn’t suggest that Nextel replace
> > it with a 100 foot Monopole and collocate with the PS Antennas.  It’s
> > less than half a mile from the Nstar structure and probably would have
> > saved them several years and quite a few bucks in legal fees. But that
> > would have been logical.
> >
> > I travel through the area occasionally and have no trouble with my
> > Nextel.  They have a high altitude site about Five miles from Wayland
> > center and it has a clear, as in I can see the Towers, view of the
> > area.
> >

	I can supply a little background here since I grew up in Wayland
and my brother currently lives there and his wife is active in local
politics. (And Wayland is the next town west of Weston where I live).

	Wayland has had, since the 1970s, a very active fringe group
which is deathly afraid of RF radiation.  This apparently grew out of
the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s when Raytheon operated a major radar
development lab near the town center and had all sorts of high power
radars on the roof (they did a lot of work for the Navy and had all
kinds of naval radars there at one time or another).    No doubt
residents living near the center of town were subject to really
substantial levels of rf from time to time as the radars were tested,
especially in the early days before rf exposure became an issue.

	In fact I remember that rf at the Wayland junior high school I
attended back in the early 60s was strong enough many days so that movie
projectors and PA and stereo systems would sometimes suddenly start
buzzing quite loudly as the radar beams swept past the building.   I
suppose I was one of the very few students who knew what was making the
noises.  I even think there may have been incidents of flourescent light
tubes spontaneously glowing, but I never observed such myself.

	In any case in the 70s rf radiation exposure became a hot potato
political issue and Raytheon cut way back on running high power radars
from the roof of the buildings.  But nevertheless, measurements of field
intensity were made by the peace oriented green types around the
Raytheon property boundary and some were apparently marginal causing
quite a contraversy and igniting an anti rf radiation movement in town.

	Raytheon has since closed the Wayland labs and there are no more
radars left and haven't been for many years, but the movement and fears
it induced continues and when cell tower construction came up in town
the anti-rf folks got together with the anti visual pollution folks and
blocked installation of almost all cell towers.

	Eventually, after years of protracted wrangling, the town
finally reluctantly agreed to allow cell towers in an area near the town
dump with few nearby houses or businesses and thought the issue was
settled.

	But carriers want antennas further east than that site which
is on the west side of the town and have been fighting to install
antennas in the center.

	And they tried at one point to get the First Parish Church to
install antennas in the steeple - it is in the center of town. My
sister-in-law who is on the parish comittee negotiated a deal, but then
the rf exposure issue came up and the anti-rf people stalled the
decision long enough so the carriers backed out and settled on a site on
the high voltage transmission line towers that run along the roadbed of
an old abandoned railroad.

	And it is this site that is being referenced in the article.
 
	Oddly enough, to finish this digression, my late father who
lived in Wayland was the one who was instrumental in setting up
the historic district refered to in the article...

-- 
	Dave Emery N1PRE,  [email-masked]  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18

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