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The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human might we
by mchannon 8y ago
The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human might weigh 80kg, = 800 watts.
My late uncle was in the US Army in Desert Storm. During that period, it was always hot, even at night, and the most comfortable place to sleep at night was on top of the humvee's hood.
But one night the radar got left on overnight, and he literally got cooked from the inside out (when it's 100 degrees outside, it's hard to pick up on that sort of thing).
He had health problems for the remainder of his life and died young (never found out how, but cancer would be my first guess). I really liked him.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoRadar would be quite a lot of RF radiation!
- jcims 8y agoI don’t know anything about the system in question but if it was mounted on a humvee it would have to be low power to avoid cooking people in the beam. Plus there will be so many reflections in an urban environment and the ranges are so short that you’d likely do better with a low power system. Maybe on the order of 5-25 watts. That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage.
- blattimwind 8y agoIf you're literally sleeping on the radar antenna you're in the near field of the antenna. Meaning, the antenna doesn't work at all like it was designed and you can get "strange" couplings, e.g. very high power density in a few spots on the body, and almost no power coupled to other parts.
- ac29 8y ago>That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage. Is it? Electric heating pads and electric blankets are certainly a thing, and they're around 10W (the one I have says 50W).
- jcims 8y agoI had a 5W CB radio a few years ago and bought one of those 'through the windshield' antennas. It basically operates by sticking two panels of tuned copper plates on each side of the glass and they just pass the RF energy between them. I made the mistake of trying to see if I could feel the 5 watts of RF energy coming from the radio side of the plate. I stuck the panel to my palm, keyed the mic, and instantly felt a searing, stabbing pain in my hand. It felt like a hot nail was jammed into the meat of my palm and was very surprisingly painful. As blattimwind said above, the distribution of RF energy in the body is going to be very unpredictable at that distance and you could have hot spots deep in the tissue that are not innervated. If you got a hot spot anywhere near what I experienced with that CB antenna I'm absolutely confident there would be tissue damage.
- IAmGraydon 8y agoIt’s pretty unusual that he would have survived the incident if he was cooked by microwave radiation. I’ve known this sort of thing to happen in ship repair accidents and they usually die within days.