BIT students design device to monitor tower radiation

BIT students design device to monitor tower radiation

Jaideep Deogharia, TNN | Jul 22, 2013, 12.27 AM IST

RANCHI: Medical science is yet to establish the exact link between mobile tower radiation and health hazards and ascertain whether it is related to mental stress levels or triggers cancerous growth. There is a known probability of health hazards being associated with high-levels of microwave radiation on which the mobile phones operate and researches on this are underway.

In the wake of such developments, students of BIT Mesra, on floating their company Decrypto, took it upon themselves to design a handheld device, to monitor the radiation level in any given locality and say with precision if the radiation levels in that particular region are within the permissible limits.

While similar devices are available in the market, the antenna-based small gadget, developed by the budding scientists is not only cost-effective but some of its features can be modulated to send time-bound radiation records to online system where they can be further analyzed.

"While this gadget costs around Rs 3000, traditional radiation meters come for Rs 6000," said Avijit Kumar Singh, director of Decrypto and a third year student of electronics and communication engineering. The students conducted an experiment at the institute to check the efficacy of the gadget.

"The campus has two mobile towers (one of Airtel and another of BSNL) whose peak to peak distance is 1217m. Three major sites of student activities were taken as the test cases. It was found that the radiation levels at these three sites were far below the standards set by the government. Hence, research verifies that the campus is free from any radiation hazards," he said.

Explaining the function of the gadget, BIT Mesra professor Srikanta Pal, said the detector detects radiations in three zones i.e., 869 - 890 MHz (CDMA), 1805 - 1880 MHz (GSM1800), 2110 - 2170 MHz (3G). "The novelty of this radiation detector is its simple and sleek design, which can be manufactured cheaply. The detector can be made easily available to the general public. But the priority is the output that is up to the mark and inferrable. The output of this detector can be easily interpreted by the observer and the audible beep alerts, in case of an impending danger," he said, adding that one of the futuristic implementation of this detector can be its installation in a densely populated region for analysis of radiation patterns there.

"This detector can also be embedded into an online module that will be able to send radiation pattern data to an online server keeping records on an hourly basis. These online data can be used by any of the general public making the whole process of detection easily available and accessible," he said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ranchi/BIT-students-design-device-to-monitor-tower-radiation/articleshow/21226448.cms