wrote in message
.. .

On 2004-12-07 said:
State in NYC. Western Electric always used flanged rigid
copper waveguide with absorptive gaskets, but radio sites in
the entire Bell System were notoriously leaky. A communication
tech who had the Empire State job for ages had a desk directly
under the elbows for the waveguide runs coming in off the roof.
One day, he simply keeled over dead. Autopsy showed he was
literally cooked from the inside out.
There was a story going around the ham radio circles in the '50's
about some out-of-tolerance readings on a radar in the DEW Line
installation that were observed about the same time every Saturday
night. It turned out that a technician was opening up a waveguide
before going out on his Saturday night date thinking he was
temporarily sterilizing himself.
This (and living below a possibly defective microwave joint) is
not in any way the same as carrying a low power cell phone in
your pocket. When you have a hole in a several kilowatt
transmission system, you have a problem.
true, but for years they've suggested that people hold handheld uhf
and microwave transmitters away from their head because of the effects
of said radiation on the soft tissues of the eyes etc.

THen there's the urban legend about the guy working a Bell system
microwave site who had to work one CHristmas eve. FOol brought some
beer to this remote location and figured out that he could sit
directly in the path of one of the feedhorns for one of these large
dishes and be warm as he darnk his beer. Said urban legend says the
dude literally cooked himself from the inside out.

Ahh, the evergreen urban myth...
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/cooked.htm

Anyone who has tried cooking something thick in a microwave
oven knows that it doesn't violate the laws of physics. It cooks
from the surface to the inside. Otherwise we couldn't enjoy
such delicacies as "Baked Alaska".