The alt-media personality Stew Peters and wearer of an even stranger style of tin foil hat than sported by Alex Jones, calls himself ‘The People’s Bullhorn’. Unfortunately on the subject of his knowledge of radio frequency devices and the spectrum that they work on, Stew Peters clearly is much more like ‘The People’s Bullcrap Horn.’

On 2^nd February of this year Mr Peter’s put out a Tweet obliquely calling for criminal damage against 5G cellular radio towers.

Mr Peters said:

The replies from this post made for interesting reading, as although there were some individuals, with obvious experience or familiarity with, physics, radio and electronics, willing to put Stew Peters and his followers right about their misconceptions about the effects of the electromagnetic spectrum, there were many more commentators who must have dropped physics at school just after they had got to the Ladybird First Book of Electricity (simplified edition) stage.

The thread is absolutely fascinating due to the extreme levels of physics ignorance on display. One contributor thought it suspicious that the 5G towers are relatively close together even though this phenomenon is very easy to understand once you realise that the higher the frequency you go, the less distance the radio wave will travel. At the sort of Ultra High and Super High Frequencies the wave will really only travel line of sight and does not bounce off of the Ionosphere and travel further as is the case with the High Frequencies which go from 3 – 30 MHz. Also at these much higher frequencies the wave can be attenuated or blocked by dust or water vapour and much else. The properties of the wave determine the distance between cell station towers which is why the stations at 5G need to be close together.

Yet another ignoramus was claiming that SHF radio waves harmed the health and ‘caused red blood cells to clump together’. This is obviously an individual who does not know or can’t be arsed to find out the difference between ionising radiation and non-ionising radiation. If you don’t understand that ionising radiation is the nasty bugger that comes from the explosion of a nuclear weapon or from a badly maintained nuclear power station or from a medical source like Cobalt 60 and that non-ionising radiation is relatively harmless at low power levels, then you have so little physics knowledge that you can’t be taken seriously on the subject of physics or radio. Mind you if you are quoting approvingly, as this poster did in order to make their point, from pseudoscience guff salesman Del Bigtree, a man who promoted avoidance of the measles vaccine to culturally isolated Haredi Jews in the middle of a measles outbreak, an outbreak partially caused by low levels of vaccination, then you can’t be taken seriously on any scientific matter.

Another contributor, also someone who may have skipped school on the day that basic physics was taught, claimed that it was not the cell towers that were the problem but the 5G phones themselves. This poster claimed that the phones were mini microwave ovens designed to afflict the user. Whilst some 5G devices do use frequencies that are up in the higher sections of the microwave part of the spectrum, the power levels put out by phones in the current 900 and 1800 MHz bands are much lower than microwave ovens, often 2 watts on the higher level for 900 megs and down in the sub 500 milliwatt at the lower level for 1800MHz and therefore have much less energy than the power levels in a microwave oven. Yes RF can be dangerous but that only applies when the power is high and a person is extremely close to the transmitting antenna. Newton’s Inverse Square Law applies here which says that the further away from an antenna you are then the less RF you will receive. It’s why TV broadcasters run on reduced power when there are antenna riggers working on a transmitter tower and who will therefore be unusually close to the active TV transmitting antenna, in order to reduce the exposure to damaging RF power levels that the workers might be exposed to. It’s pretty obvious that this contributor knows the square root of sod all about both radio and the effect on RF on the human body.

What Peters and his acolytes don’t know or understand when it comes to physics and the electromagnetic spectrum is absolutely astonishing. He and his followers are so ignorant of basic and incontrovertible facts that it is completely gobsmacking. Now I might have some advantage in talking about this sort of thing because I have have had a lifelong interest in radio and hold a basic entry level radio licence, But what Peters and his fan club are failing to get to grips with regarding radio is not anything scientifically esoteric or that which would be out of the average person’s expected knowledge, such as Tropospheric Tunnelling for example, but stuff that is basic school physics of the type that I was taught in the early years of secondary school.

The sort of radio waves that 5G and other current and future mobile phone systems operate or will operate on, are not ‘killer waves’, the tech specs of the systems and the physics of radio completely disprove that. Whilst I accept there are privacy implications involved when there are a vast number of wirelessly connected devices ranging from fridges to mobile computers being hooked up together, but that’s a political rather than scientific matter, the actual waves themselves are nothing at all to worry about. A lot of the nasties on the radio frequency spectrum such as ultra violet, gamma rays, X rays and cosmic rays start right up above the area where light is and at around 30 Petahertz in the middle of the Ultra Violet sector. This is a long long way away from mobile phone frequencies. Yes there will be some use of the higher parts of the microwave spectrum in the 3 to 30GHz range but some of the 5G phones are even in that part of the spectrum vacated by broadcasters following the shift to digital TV broadcasting in the 470 to 800MHz bands and we’ve been living surrounded by such frequency emissions for decades with very little if any ill effect on humans.

Stew Peters knows nothing at all about how the electromagnetic spectrum works or how it affects or doesn’t affect the human body and his followers obviously know even less. It’s amazing how Stew Peters can be so wrong so consistently about things that are based in basic practical physics of the sort that nearly everyone interacts with every day whether that be by tuning a radio to Radio Four longwave, answering a mobile phone call or watching over the air broadcast television. If Peters can be so absolutely and provably wrong on something as basic and as fundamental as the nature of the RF spectrum then how on earth can anybody trust him and his site on anything else? Stew Peters and his followers have proven to me that they are an example of how a self starting moron can gather followers who are even more moronic than he is.

To conclude: I don’t want to see the likes of Stew Peters or his followers to be unable to speak the contents of what little brains they might possess and to disappear from general view, that’s not the point of my criticisms of him and his output. On the contrary I want to see him and his pals out in the open as it gives me something to laugh at when I need to laugh and in any event it is better that such idiocy is on display where it can be challenged rather than festering away in the shadows. It is preferable that Peters and the shipload of fools who are his supporters can be openly mocked for their foolishness, rather than have them in echo chambers where Peters could, unchallenged, continue to vacuum up the attention and the money of the mad and the gullible and possibly transmogrifying into something worse or more radically divorced from reality than he and his acolytes already are.