Editor: I am a Tsawwassen resident and I am adamantly opposed to the proposed radio towers in Point Roberts.
As a retired 30-year telephone lineman/installer (B.C. Tel and Telus) in the Lower Mainland, I can't begin to tell you all the stories that I (and fellow field staff) have regarding calls to the phone company with our customers complaining of a radio-station-on-theline. These calls played a big part in a repairman's weekly tasks.
For the company, and as a worker, there was a frustrating (and costly) redundancy to all of it as our attempts at alleviating (or just suppressing) radioon-line was only marginally successful.
The main factor in Tsawwassen is that so many of the houses built in the 1960s, '70s and early '80s were wired using the older three-strand (party line) telephone wire. Problems really got going when people began buying their own phones (cheap, after-market phones and fax-phones where profit margins dictated these be made without proper radio frequency noise suppression being built in).
Owners of homes with the old three-strand (red, blue, yellow or red, green, yellow) phone station jack runs, and there are many, should be most concerned about this new, uninvited threat that will come with these proposed radio towers.
The proposed radio frequency strengths will become a nightmare, affecting most of our (home and mobile) electronic devices here in Tsawwassen and likely even in Ladner.
If this project goes ahead, it is my experience that any device with a speaker in the home will have an uninvited voice. This is the nature of beastly radio towers.
I say stop this proposal now.
WT (Bill) Hamilton
