David wrote:
On Mon, 22 May 2006 08:54:19 +0100, "Gerry" wrote:

Can anyone help me with research for my degree.

I'm looking for information on ham radio enthusiasts who suffer
from manic depression (bipolar syndrome). I'm researching the
effects of RF fields on electrical activity in the brain. This
particular form of mental illness may be specifically at risk.

Can you put me in contact with anyone who could help me?


Thanks

Gerry


Call these people. They run a listserver for broadcast engineers who
work in much stronger RF fields than your amateur types.

http://www.bext.com/_CGC/

He posted this exact same request in rec.ham-radio on April 30th. I
posted the reply below but never saw any response...

Gerry,

Just a suggestion...

Ham radio is:

1) Mostly intermittent; i.e., many hams are only on for a couple of
hours per day or a few hours per week.

2) Hams are limited to 1000 watts of power (roughly speaking-please
no sniping on PEP and such), and many hams, for various reasons, do
not run that much power, but typically use about 100 watts output.

Therefore, you are putting several constraints on your study. Let me
offer the following suggestion:

Try studying the population near some high power commercial AM or FM
broadcast stations. The frequencies they use are a bit different than
the ham frequencies but they are using high power and are on around
the clock.

For example, the AM outlet of the TV station I worked for, was
running 50,000 watts to a directional antenna system. (The TV and AM
stations were in two different suburbs, by the way). In the main lobe
of this AM antenna array, the power was closer to 500,000 watts ERP
(effective radiated power). The signal was so strong, people living
in the main lobe of the antenna pattern were getting sparks off the
aluminum siding of their houses and shocks off the rabbit ear
antennas on their TV sets (BTW, this was 30 years ago, so if you are
younger, you may not even know what 'rabbit ear antennas' are).

On the rare occasions that I visited the AM site, I remember
wondering what effect (if any) all that RF was having on the people
that lived in that neighborhood.

Good luck with your study!

Regards, Carter K8VT