RF Shorts – Aug. 13, 2010

  • •The impact of RF exposure seems to be getting more press lately. You can find some tips on avoiding it in the article ElectroSmog: 10 ways to avoid frying your brain by Beth Greer. Tip #8: "Learn how to measure the various fields in your home by using meters and detection equipment that measure specific frequencies."
  • •Online newspaper SF Appeal asks Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: Are San Franciscans Being Overly Sensitive?. The article quotes James Rubin, a psychiatry research fellow at London's King's College. He attributes EHS to the "nocebo effect" in which you expect something to cause symptoms, then get anxious about this and start looking for such symptoms. And sure enough, you sometimes find them. As the article notes, a false disease offers little hope for a cure.
  • •The Patriot Ledger has a nice story on a transmitter facility once used by the Voice of America in the article Scituate's radio station helped save the world. The station history began in 1936 when inventor and philanthropist Walter Lemon leased a 40-acre tract of land along Hatherly Beach. "His testing indicated it would be a strong point from which to launch powerful shortwave signals that could successfully reach Europe, Africa, and Latin America."
  • •Iridium Communications, the company using a constellation of many low Earth orbiting satellites to provide connectivity around the world, has received commitments for $1.8 billion credit facility for construction of Iridium NEXT, its next generation constellation of satellites. I wonder if the design of the new satellites will create Iridium flares as bright as the first generation ones?
Doug Lung

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack.
A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.