Folks, it’s time for a bit of education. I have seen at least 50 posts this morning about 5G signals and how they’re contributing to the Coronovirus. This is the same thing that happened with swine flu, bird flu and SARS in conjunction with the release of 4G and 3G cell phone services in the past decade. So I’m going to explain a few things with me. I’m sure some of you won’t believe it, but I’m going to go with the assumption that many of you will bother to read through this article and STOP TO THINK for a moment about what I’m saying. I don’t work for a cell phone company. I don’t work for a telecommunications company. I have no stock in those companies. I’m not actually profiting from any of this, so when I say “you can trust that I have no ulterior motive”, it is something you can actually believe.

I am a software engineer; I’ve studies computer systems and all manner of technology related to communication – not just what is in use today, but what has been a part of communications on this planet for the better part of 100 years. I make my living writing software at an insurance firm; software that is used for tracking quotes on commercial insurance. Prior to that I’ve done software for banking, I’ve done software for medical, software for shopping carts, websites for promoting a seamstress, a website for a restaurant, and a website for a confectioner (candy store). I’ve taught technology related to video production, 3D animation, editing photos, making websites, writing video games, and designing buildings.

The computer systems and communications degrees might sound like the most important factors here, but the truth is, the most important factor in my ability to explain this comes from the fact that I can read and write. So with that said, let me explain this to you – it’s not hard, and it’s important to know what you’re really looking at.

Radio waves, the ones that carry radio signals, are a form of non-ionizing radiation. What is non-ionizing radiation? Non-ionizing (or non-ionizing) radiation refers to any type of electromagnetic radiation that does not carry enough energy per quantum (photon energy) to ionize atoms or molecules—that is, to completely remove an electron from an atom or molecule. Read that carefully. Non-ionizing radiation does NOT carry enough energy to remove an electron from an atom or molecule. For any form of change to a substance to take place, you need to alter the composition of the elements that make up that substance. Changing the state (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) is NOT the same as changing the electro-chemical structure. Something going from solid to liquid to gas to plasma is about how much energy is applied to those substance, but NOT about how many electrons the substance has. In other words, it’s a physical change, not chemical, nor electrical.

That means that radio waves do NOT change anything about the properties of any substance. Why is this important to know? Because the 5G signal from your latest iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices is, in fact, a radio signal. There are a number of different frequency ranges that are used for 5G service, depending on the service, and the country – and each country generally handles identifying ranges of frequencies which they make available to the various cell phone carriers. So T-Mobile would have one set of frequencies, Sprint would have another, Verizon another, AT&T another… and many of the smaller “budget” carriers then license subsections of the frequency range of a bigger carrier; or they allow the bigger carrier to handle the responsibility of keeping things organized; and the bigger carriers charge more simply because they prioritize their direct carriers to have the best access. That’s why you pay more for the “brand name” service of a cell phone carrier.

But that doesn’t mean that the 5G signal is safe… does it? Well, actually, it might not in-and-of itself, but you need to understand that the same radio frequency concept that drives your cell phone is also driving the FM radio in your car or home. In this case, the FM radio has a range of 88 to 108 MHz, and radio stations all use a specific frequency with about 200 Khz of separation between one radio station and the next; and if they’ve set up properly, they should be smack-dab in the middle of that frequency.

That’s why you have radio stations like: 88.1, 88.3, 88.5, 98.5, 101.3 – notice how they all end in odd numbers? Why is that? Well, let’s say you have a radio station. Your station is assigned to the 93 MHz band, specifically you’re supposed to broadcast on the frequency 93,300 KHz. That means that your signal should be heard between 93,200 KHz and 93,400 KHz. The next station up would be from 93,400 KHz to 93,600 KHz, and that would mean dead center is 93,500 KHz. Now modern car radios are digital, so they tend to lock on specifically to the frequency… So your radio station is 93,300 KHz (or 93.3 MHz), and that means your radio in your car is, theoretically, going directly to 93.3 MHz. In practice, signals can be affected slightly by atmospheric distortion, fluctuations in power to the transmitter, and other forms of radio distortion that make a signal “noisy” – adding static. So your digital receiver will try to adjust itself to lock on to the signal where it is strongest, without leaving that 200 KHz window for your signal. So if, briefly, 93,298 KHz is where the signal lies, the receiver will try to adjust to that frequency to give you a clean signal.

The 88 MHz to 108 MHz signal range means that, with the proper 200 KHz buffer, you’d be limited to 100 stations. Last I checked, there are more than 300 cities in the United States of America alone, and of those 300 cities, all of them have more than one radio station… so how can there be all these stations if there are only 100 stations with of range?

The fact is that radio frequencies don’t necessarily have THAT much range in terms of physical distance. On average, they get around 30 to 40 miles. That’s why you can tune to a station in one city, and drive to a city about an hour’s drive a ways (if you do 60 MPH speed) – and the radio station will either no longer be the one you were listening to, or it’ll simply be static… and maybe an occasional blip of a signal from the one in your home town. At about the 35 mile mark, you’ll start to see a fairly rapid degradation of the signal. It’ll start being fuzzy, full of static, and eventually just drop right out. And if you were listening to a hard rock station, you might now be listening to NPR’s All Things Considered… or just random static. If there is a radio station in your town that is licensed to operate at 93.3 MHz, and one in the next city that also has this frequency, the fact that they are 60 miles apart means that the signals will barely interfere as it is; and commonly the FCC tries to keep things organized so that the signals won’t overlap at all; I mean, I like the idea of crossover music, but Beethoven and GWAR don’t entirely mix.

OK, so great, we understand radio signals for FM. What does that have to do with Cellular signals? The cellular phone services are just in another part of the same range of radio frequencies. Depending on which service and which generation of technology we’re referring to, they could be in a number of different places on the range of frequencies that make up the radio spectrum. They all have one thing in common, though – they are all, still, non-ionizing radiation – and that means, again, that they can’t rip away or add on an electronic to any atomic / molecular construct. And that means, there is nothing changing about the substance. That means that the substance stayed precisely the same! That’s right, your cell phone can’t cause cancer, because cancer is a growth of abnormal cells caused by a change in the atomic / molecular composition of those cells, which can only come from a change of chemical composition which would require either direct chemical interaction or ionizing radiation… and your cell phone doesn’t work on that form of radiation.

Even more importantly, a virus which mutates and can suddenly infect humans can’t have been mutated, manipulated or engineered by a cell phone signal because, once again, those sorts of changes would be chemical in nature – and they would require ionization to cause that sort of reaction WITHOUT a chemical driving the change.

So I’m betting now, some people are saying “but what about radiation from sources like Nuclear Power Plants”. Yes, those forms of radiation are dangerous – potentially lethal, in fact. But that’s not energy on the radio-frequency ranges. The radiation produced in nuclear reactions is, in fact, ionizing radiation. It’s caused from the breakdown of the physical fuel sources with electronics being freed from the fuel to either crash into each other and either causing a fission reaction (where they split) or fusion reaction (where they merge) to generate heat. And the heat is then used to run a steam turbine, which turns a generator, which produces the electrical current that goes out to electrical grid serving your home and business.

The radiation produced from these sorts of fields is ionizing, and VERY dangerous. That’s what made Chernobyl such a scary thing – the ability to contain that ionizing radiation was lost, and the whole of space around it was suddenly alive with a form of energy which can easily change the composition of atoms and molecules. That’s what killed many people, whether rapidly because of the near immediate expose to changes in their body that would be lethal, or through the gradual change of their body structure to create tumors and cancers. Truthfully, none of the deaths happened due to radiation immediately, but due to fire and physical explosion at the plant. The radiation-related deaths took at least several hours to happen; not that it made it less horrible. In fact, those were probably the more gruesome deaths. But I digress.

The fact is that the forms of radiation that come from nuclear power and similar applications is SEVERELY dangerous; but it’s not the same thing as radio-frequency radiation. Radiation is probably the word that scares everyone anyway. Everyone hears it and thinks of “Chernobyl” or “Hiroshima” or “Nagasaki”. But frankly, radiation also means your microwave oven, your stove top, your television set, your furnace, your hot-water heater, and even your own body! OH NO, MY BODY?! MY BODY IS PRODUCING RADIATION? Yes, it is – in the form of heat. In fact, anything generating heat is really generating a form of radiation. That word, radiation – it just means the release of energy. So anything that releases any form of heat, light, sound, or radio waves is, in fact, producing radiation.

OK, so wait a minute. Are you saying that all these radio signals aren’t dangerous? Yes. But aren’t they unnatural? I suppose you could say they are, because of the source… but these same radio waves exist in nature already. Want proof of it? Fine. What is the Arecibo Observatory?

The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It is a giant collector of radio signals, used for making astronomical observations of the universe. In fact, it’s commonly thought that telescopes only take “pictures” of things. But what they really do is receive a signal as some form of radiation. Remember that light is a form of radiation as well. Are you afraid of the lamp in your living room giving you cancer? No? Why not? Because it’s a non-ionizing form of radiation. Unless you touch a hot bulb, it can’t hurt you. The light is something that doesn’t damage your body. At least, not that sort of light. Visible light doesn’t cause damage to you. And it’s part of the same sort of spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation. Back to Arecibo, that telescope collects radio-waves that come in from outer space and is used to look for repeating signals. Those signals have pretty much all been naturally occurring signals; radio waves generated by stars, mostly. And those waves have been bombarding the earth since the beginning of the planet’s existence. If radio waves were dangerous, life would never have existed at all. The average star has a lot more power than all of the cell towers in the world combined.

So does that mean there is no government conspiracy involving radio waves and viruses and all that sort of stuff? Yes, sadly, it’s all fantasy.

But wait, what about the weapons that were being designed for use on crowds. Stuff to cause nausea, pain, vertigo…. all that stuff? What about microwave weapons?

Well, I can go into more detail on that if you want at another point, but the short version is: most of the weapons of that nature either used ionizing radiation – which lead to them being outlawed by Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1977, or they make use of things like bright lights which are non-ionizing radiation which simply overload your nerves temporarily. These are physical effects, not chemical effects, and while they are dangerous, they aren’t the cause of radio-waves. They’re an entirely different spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation that works VASTLY differently. Also, if the government really intended to use that sort of stuff, why did some of the systems that were developed and tested in 2003 – 2004 disappear? They weren’t effective; they were energy intensive and not nearly as effective, plus the risk was too high of the wrong folks getting that technology, so it was decided that it wasn’t worth deploying… and that was the end of it. But they don’t work anything like your cell phone or radio.

Well, OK, I suppose your radio can cause nausea, but I blame the music itself, not the radio that broadcasts it.

OK, so let’s sum all of this up.

Cell Phones, FM Radio, Wireless Internet and even Bluetooth technology all use radio-frequency radiation, which is non-ionizing radiation. That means that it cannot cause atoms or molecules to be manipulated into losing or adding electrons, meaning that the structure and makeup cannot change, meaning it CANNOT cause you to get a virus, bacteria, tumor, cancer or anything else.

The only form of communication that can be dangerous in this fashion is lasers, because they light frequencies they use can cause burns to your eyes. So don’t ever look into the source of a laser. They have use as medical tools in restoring site, but they are always operated by doctors under carefully controlled conditions. Some lasers do cause ionizing radiation, but they aren’t effective for communication devices in a general sense, because communication depends on wide area broadcast, and lasers only work effectively with a tightly focused beam. So they won’t likely ever be used for communication that way.

Finally, for all the conspiracy buffs, I have two points to make. First, the problem with the idea of a government conspiracy is that for it to be effective, the concept has to be VERY simple, and involve the fewest number of people to execute said conspiracy. Second, there has to be an outcome that justifies the effort put into the conspiracy – and an outcome that makes it easier to maintain order. Causing chaos that leads to needing to spend more money to help people would be working at odds with the very conspiracy that’s being concerned.

Now, if you do want to learn about a possible conspiracy and cover up related to radio that IS interesting, look into the conspiracy of numbers stations. That is a conspiracy that has been going on for quite some time, and it makes a whole lot more sense.

PS – If you’ve made it this far, I’m attaching a link to the United States Frequency Allocations chart for the Radio Spectrum on Wikipedia. Understand that the signal for 5G in the spectrum is somewhere between the 2 and 6 GHz ranges… and that range varies by country, so if 5G is the supposed problem, then every single part of the spectrum would be a danger, because the allocations might be different in other countries, meaning everyone is being exposed to those frequencies from different sources, so cell phones wouldn’t be the only problem – literally everything would be the problem.

The 2016 radio frequency chart for the United States