The AM Forum

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704457604576011471557164008.html


No kidding.

And why did they decide to choose routers for the experiment?

Phil - AC0OB

lol...

hams in MA probably know about what I'm talking about below:

some years ago there was a big kerfuffle around the "emanations" of
the Pave Paws phased-array radar at Cape Cod...senators, local resident
committees, doctors from Texas, crazy electrical engineering academics
supporting said doctors from Texas, etc., etc., a regular circus which
ended up consuming millions of dollars before ending up in front of
the National Academies of Science which issued a report none of the
polemicists believed in (they saw it as one of them scientific conspiracies
to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids). The whole thing eventually
died because the town-criers who started the whole thing moved away.

At some point I got embroiled in the imbroglio because I had done
some work with a sane Federal employee who was called to testify
at the NAS hearing. So I did some internet digging with the Wayback
Machine and discovered how the whole dog'n pony show started in
the first place.

Anyone care to guess how the whole thing was started ?

Does "follow the money" apply?

back door barney

keep guessing guys !

oh heck, I'll give it away: a few of the locals (who started the noise)
got wind of a class project, done by a student at a Boston college
(who put his work on a web page which later morphed into the
main web page used by the locals to fight the Air Force), that was
premised on an imaginary scenario that posited harmful health
effects of the radar pulses, not because of their power but rather
because of their _shape_ ! And a crusade, which ate up around
$10 mill of tax payer money, was born !

I kid you not.

would that be an ear mark, political pork, ear wig, pick pocket of just another crook shimming silver off a quarter

My father-in-law worked on the design and construction of that project. One night he gave me a grand tour of the inside of the thing.  This was a little while before it became operational. 

Hundreds of separate rf power modules, working into steerable arrays.  No mechanically moving parts.  They used the Loran-C station on Nantucket as a time/frequency standard.

We used to train down on Camp Edwards, where the PAVE-PAWS stite is located.  The environmental wackos kept causing more and more curtailment of training to the point of not being able to run any effective combat training at all, we couldn't shoot, because the 'propellant residue' was 'toxic', and the bullets were lead, which is as we all know an EVIL metal.  We couldn't use pyro, or explosives for similar reasons.  Finally parts of the post were off limits to any movement, because of some ground nesting bird (never saw one my whole life training there). 

I almost got busted back to private there because of those damn birds. PL and PSG left for a briefing, and I got left in charge, and was told to get my platoon of 6 M113 apcs to a link up point running recon along the way.  I ended up leading the whole platoon through a restricted environmental area, ON THE DIRT ROAD.  I had to go before the base commander and was with in scant inches of having my stripes yanked.  What saved me was the fact that we could never get new maps (they were hard to get for some reason, we had to use 20+ yr old maps for training) and my old maps didn't have the restricted areas on them, that and there were no signs at all on our end of the RA.  Finally we convinced them that I wasn't just out joy riding over piping plover eggs in my M113.

heh ! that's what typically happens, but not in this case. The money was spent
to do legit work in order to placate the locals but this legit work was attempting
to measure a non-existent "effect." The only reason more money wasn't spent
is that the main local instigator moved out of the area, shortly after the
NAS panel issued its report, and no longer cared about the imagined "cancers"
that were caused by the imagined "effect."