There's been a number of scare stories about the risks of mobile phone masts cooking small children and the like in the media. Whilst there's no conclusive evidence of any risk and some simple maths and physics shows that masts are probably less of a real risk than handheld phones, there is still not much sense in phone networks installing antennae virtually inside someone's house, what were they thinking?

Thanks to Petri for spotting this lunacy. There are far better ways of installing antennae, the Undetectables for instance do some particularly cunning installations, and Orange have some masts that look like trees.

Can you spot the masts in these pictures?

Quick overview of how radiation levels diminish over distance

Radiation exposure diminishes with distance on a square law relationship, i.e. if you double the distance you quarter the exposure. Hence a 1W mobile phone 10mm from your brain (10,000W/m2) exposes you to 10,000 times the rediation that a 100W mast could generate at 10m (1W/m2)! I'm guessing a little at power outputs whilst 1W is a typical value for a GSM phone, also I'd expect a base station to output far less than 100W, maybe as little as 5-10W.

This doesn't take into account duty cycles, where a base station would transmit almost continuously whilst a handset would transmit as little as possible, but it still shows that a handset will expose you to higher radiation levels than a base station ever could.