Well, Gee....

I am still reading Dr. Kruse's latest blog post, but this one has been bugging me so I'll discuss it now.

Jack says that the 4G phones are so bad because of all that high frequency stuff.

The "G" in the phone is not gigaherz, or even grounding, gravity, goose liver.  It's GENERATION.

A long long time ago, back when electronics was all analog, different folks were allocated various amounts of bandwidth to do all their fun radio and cosmic ray stuff.  The voice radio we all know and love has a fairly wide band, to make sure that voice quality is adequate.

As radios became more sophisticated and bandwidth availability became tight, it became easier to design phones and other devices with faster less-error-prone data transfer while keeping the bandwidth as small as possible.  Back in the old ham radio days, everyone knew that you could transer Morse code messages much farther distances with the same power than a full voice, because they were basically just clicks.

Later and later generations of cell phone data protocols went from a digital/analog combo to full digital, with increasing improvements in speed.  The way this was done was to go from full voice to just a bunch of really fast clicks.  Along with the explosion in the use of wireless devices, additional bandwidth at higher frequencies was allocated, but again, the overall power of the devices was minimized compared to the earlier models.  Every time the changes were great enough, a new Generation was named.

Oh, heck, what do I know?  I don't have a cell phone.  I have a land-line with a handset with a real cord with power supplied from the phone company.  Why you ask?  OK, this home is a geekdom, we have all sorts of phones and wireless devices, and of course that wirefull phone we use during an earthquake when the regular power is down and we want to call mom and tell her we are still alive.