Cell phones, pagers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth – the wireless revolution is everywhere. Except here.

I'm 1 mile east of command central in the Quiet Zone, sitting in a Dodge pickup with Wesley Sizemore, Keeper of the Quiet. In a world saturated with radio waves, the Quiet Zone is a haven and an anomaly. A unique combination of geography and legislation has rendered its 13,000 square miles nearly free of electromagnetic pollution. Sizemore's job is to keep it that way. On this freezing afternoon, he's showing me the scene of his most storied success: a double-wide modular home amid brown grass and patches of snow in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (population 8,996).

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Photo by Jonathan Manzo

One morning several years ago, Sizemore got a call. Broadband interference – noise, in common parlance – was wreaking havoc with the sensitive equipment at command central. After loading up his truck with a receiver, amp, spectrum analyzer, and directional antenna, he thundered into the countryside. Every quarter mile or so, he stopped, whipped out the antenna, and scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for spikes of activity. He methodically triangulated his way to this spot, where an elderly couple live with a nasty old dog penned in back. The couple had given the mutt a heating pad to lie on, but the pad had become worn; cracks in the wiring were causing tiny electric arcs to leap across the gaps. "Not enough electricity to shock the dog," Sizemore explains, but enough to produce a radio-frequency signal. He promptly disposed of the heating pad and bought the couple a new one. Just one more small step in humankind's exploration of the cosmos.

The Quiet Zone is a generous margin of mountainous terrain and rustic communities surrounding the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, a 485-foot, 17 million-pound structure that emerges improbably from this remote valley. Astronomers here observe the universe by studying faint radio waves emitted by stars, evaporating comets, and distant galaxies. These signals inhabit many areas of the electromagnetic spectrum – often the same areas prized by broadcasters, cellular providers, and other communications companies.

The subjects of radio astronomy are astronomically large, but the signals they produce are astronomically weak by the time they reach Earth. These emissions are measured in Janskys, named for the father of radio astronomy, Karl Jansky. A Jansky is based on 0.00000000000000000000000001 watts – and that's a big signal at Green Bank. Even a musical greeting card playing at the base of the telescope could produce anomalous spikes in the data of an unlucky astronomer trying to study stellar gases. If the interference is strong enough, the telescope's ultrasensitive first amplifier – cooled by liquid helium to minimize internal noise – shuts down.

Sizemore, 49, has safeguarded the telescope and its mission since 1983. One minute he's running signal propagation models, the next he's sledgehammering the base of a power-line pole to rejigger its insulation, and then he's alerting the site director about an unexpected incursion: North American flying squirrels tagged with telemetry transmitters, a project of the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

In the past few years, however, Sizemore's job has become overwhelming. The wireless revolution has swept the country beyond the Zone. First pagers and cell phones, then satellite radio, souped-up walkie-talkies, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth – one after another, these technologies have cranked up the surrounding cacophony. There are even sources of radio-frequency interference raining from the sky: Transmissions from a Russian Glonass satellite recently derailed efforts to study a faraway cluster of galaxies.

Sizemore's efforts to shield Green Bank's radio waves from the encroachment of civilization may make him seem a quaint relic of the past. Actually, he's a harbinger of the future: The problems that keep him awake at night are increasingly everyone else's problems, too.



Photo by Jonathan Manzo

Chief antenna engineer Robert Anderson surveys the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone from the center of the world�s largest fully steerable radio telescope.

While electromagnetic spectrum is a finite resource, the number and variety of gadgets emitting electromagnetic energy continue to grow. As the airwaves become more crowded, signals from devices operating in neighboring frequencies spill into one another's bands. When spectrum allocation frays at the edges, devices go haywire: Garage doors open and close by themselves, phone conversations blare over baby monitors. The stakes also can be frighteningly high, as when emergency workers can't coordinate a disaster response effort. Some observers fear that interference is becoming so severe that soon there won't be enough spectrum to go around.

Sizemore has been feeling that way for a long time. He has been tracking down and stifling stray signals for more than two decades; engineers and regulators are just beginning to explore ways of operating in a spectrum-saturated environment. "In terms of the RFI issue," says Green Bank site director Philip Jewell, "we're the canary in the coal mine."

The astronomers who selected Green Bank as the site for the telescope in the mid-1950s chose carefully. The surrounding Allegheny Mountains provided a natural shield against radio and television broadcasts. Flanked by national forests teeming with black bears and wild turkeys, the area would remain undeveloped in perpetuity. And for all its physical isolation, it was only a day's drive from many East Coast universities. Even back in the '50s, though, farsighted scientists feared that radio-frequency emitters would eventually creep into the area. More aggressive protection would be necessary.

Thus, in 1958 the FCC set aside a rectangular-shaped territory the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined and called it the National Radio Quiet Zone, to be administrated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a government-funded research facility in Charlottesville, Virginia. The NRAO later built other radio telescopes – in Socorro, New Mexico (the setting for the film Contact with Jodie Foster), and Tucson, Arizona – but it never again had the clout to impose quiet around them. Today, Green Bank is radio astronomy's crown jewel. Over the years, the telescope has played a key role in understanding the behavior of pulsars, searching for extraterrestrial life, and probing the halo of hydrogen that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy. It's one of the few facilities on the planet where radio astronomers can make observations at most points along the electromagnetic spectrum.

All major transmitters in the Zone are required to coordinate their operations with the national observatory. Radio stations point their antennas away and operate at reduced power. Cell phone base stations are few and far between, and entirely absent deep in the Zone. Even incidental electromagnetic emitters are regulated: Power lines must be buried 4 feet belowground. The wireless LAN card in your laptop? Forget about it.

"Your cell phone and pager won't work here," Sizemore warned me before I came out for a visit. He was right. As I negotiate the snowy switchbacks on Route 250 West, my cell phone passes out of service while the FM dial gradually becomes depopulated. By the time I reach the tiny burg of Green Bank, all I can get is a static-shrouded episode of A Prairie Home Companion from a radio station outside the Zone.

The facility itself looks like any high tech office building, except for the full-scale replica of the antenna Jansky used in 1932 to discover "mysterious radio waves" emanating from the Milky Way – a natural phenomenon that, for a time, he mistook for communications from an alien civilization.

The next morning, I meet Sizemore for breakfast in the dining hall. He shows up in a black leather jacket and an earth-toned, Navajo-print flannel shirt. His beard is a thicket of graying bristles. Sizemore grew up in the mountain hamlet of Trout, West Virginia. He spent six years in the Navy, during which he was stationed in the Bahamas and the Mediterranean before returning to West Virginia to attend Bluefield State College. Then he was off to the Cleveland Institute of Electronics, where he earned an associate degree in electrical engineering. He's an Appalachian-high tech hybrid who makes his own wine and listens to NPR.

He's also a verbal snowplow when he gets worked up about the Quiet Zone. Once he latches onto a subject like "tropo-scatter" or "free space loss," he's unstoppable. "I take the maintaining of the Quiet Zone very personal," he explains in a West Virginia lilt. "It's my way of making a contribution to the body of mankind's knowledge."



Photo by Jonathan Manzo

Sections of the 100-by-110-meter telescope, which is made up of 2,004 actuator-driven panels.

The quiet lets astronomers measure electromagnetic waves thrown off by space-borne molecules when they become heated or collide. Each type of molecule emits energy in a unique frequency band; hydrogen, the most abundant molecule in the universe, is in the 1,400 to 1,427-MHz range. This band and a few others have been set aside by international treaty exclusively for radio astronomy. In practice, spillage from neighboring bands can cause interference even in these tiny slivers of spectrum.

Although just about any electronic or electromechanical device can blind Green Bank's telescope, the biggest culprit in the first category is the observatory itself. After all, it's a high tech operation crammed with sophisticated electronics and PCs. Green Bank director Jewell believes that some of the steps taken to mitigate interference at the facility may someday be adopted in the wider world, such as innovative circuit board designs and extensive shielding. The cafeteria's microwave oven is kept in a shielded cage. Large chambers designed to absorb radio waves – including a 5,000-square-foot conference room – have been built to make sure that, as Sizemore tells it, "radiation generated in the building stays in the building." Outside, spark plugs are notorious radio-frequency emitters, so Green Bank maintains a fleet of diesel-powered, electronics-free '69 Checker cabs and '70s Dodge trucks.

Thousands of tourists visit Green Bank each year, many of them stuffing their day packs with cell phones, two-way radios, and similar wireless gadgetry. The good news is that these devices operate at low power levels. The bad news is that they're mobile. The FCC doesn't control unlicensed transmitters, but West Virginia's Radio Astronomy Zoning Act prohibits any RFI-generating device – licensed or not – within 2 miles of the telescope.

Sizemore is more anxious about pervasive emitters: cellular telephones, two-way pagers, wireless email. Under FCC rules known as geographic area licensing, service providers can erect transmitters anywhere in a designated region without notifying the commission of the exact location. The policy worries Sizemore. "We don't know where the final transmitter sites will be," he says, which makes it difficult to assess the impact of a new transmitter on the telescope's operations ahead of time.

Meanwhile, there are more immediate challenges. Sizemore wants to show me a transmitter that poses a direct danger to the telescope, a kind of electromagnetic sword of Damocles. "Dress warmly," he warns.

The next morning, we're standing on the icy patio of the Sunrise Backcountry Hut, a remote cabin on top of a mountain a couple miles from the Snowshoe Mountain ski resort. Sizemore was right about bundling up. It's 14 degrees, and snow flurries whirl overhead.

Snowshoe wants to install a transmitter to relay the cabin's smoke-detector alarm to headquarters. But the cabin is only 7.5 miles from the telescope, with no mountains in between. If the alarm went off and the transmitter relayed its signal, the result, Sizemore says, would be "catastrophic."

Before the resort can install the transmitter, it must obtain a waiver from Green Bank. And when it comes to waivers, Sizemore's standard line is "If you're going to make a buck with it, don't ask!" But this case is different. Public safety trumps research.

The trick is to configure the system so it won't blow an amp at Green Bank the moment a hapless lodger attempts to cook blackened salmon. It may be possible to equip the emergency transmitter with a directional antenna aimed at a 90-degree angle away from the telescope toward a Verizon wireless base station in Warm Springs Mountain, Virginia, about 40 miles south. Then the base station would redirect the signal back to Snowshoe. Sizemore and Nathan Sharp, a lanky Green Bank technician, test the idea with their own equipment, which includes an antenna that looks like a high tech coatrack. "Slow and easy. Keep going to the right," he tells Sharp, who is gripping the antenna. "That's a nice strong signal there."

While Sizemore and Sharp fiddle with the antenna, I catch a bumpy snowmobile ride down the mountain to talk to Jim Haas, VP of resort services at Snowshoe. Haas, a pale, beefy man with a wispy soul patch, wears a blue jacket and matching Snowshoe cap.

The smoke detector is just one detail in a much larger system that Snowshoe has had to adapt to Quiet Zone priorities, Haas tells me. "It has made our communications more difficult and cost us more money," he says without rancor. The resort has staff operating on both sides of the mountain, and normal practice would be to install a repeater at the peak to boost signals to employees' handsets. But that would fry the telescope, so he's had to install hardwired components at double the cost.

Still, Haas isn't complaining. "Wesley has worked as hard as anyone to find ways for us to operate," he says. Haas has been an employee at Snowshoe for more than 25 years – he knows the rules of the Quiet Zone. Skiers are a different matter. "People are bringing Motorola Talkabouts on the mountain," he says, and there's little Sizemore can do about that.



Photo by Jonathan Manzo

Wesley Sizemore at his desk with a directional antenna.

By the time I get back up to the Sunrise Lodge, Sizemore is showing the Snowshoe staff how the directional antenna can be placed under the metal roofing, further shielding the telescope from the transmitter's signal. The beauty of the scheme is in its economical use of power and spectrum. A typical antenna would radiate 48 watts of power in all directions. The directional antenna concentrates only 3 watts in one direction – toward the Verizon tower – accomplishing the same goal far more efficiently.

Sizemore's solution is typical of his stingy approach toward spectrum. He uses an optical analogy to make his point. "Why do we have streetlights that shine up into the night sky?" he asks. "We're illuminating the bellies of airplanes for no reason. So why would you have an antenna radiating in all directions when you want to communicate in one direction?"

As I gaze out over the snowy Allegheny Mountains, I imagine the area surrounding the Quiet Zone as a huge mosaic of RF emitters. Sizemore's job is to fit all the pieces into a harmonious whole – and to do so constantly, in an ever changing landscape. This concept, as it happens, may be the ultimate solution to the interference problem everywhere.

There's no question that use of the electromagnetic spectrum is sharply increasing. In 1994, the FCC projected that by 2000 there would be 54 million users of mobile wireless services in the US; the actual number reached 110 million. In spite of industry woes, the number of cellular base stations worldwide is expected to climb from 1.3 million in 2003 to 1.6 million by 2006, serving 1.8 billion wireless users. Meanwhile, short-range and satellite transmissions are multiplying.

The parts of the spectrum set aside for unlicensed devices – the 900-MHz, 5.7-GHz, and 2.4-GHz bands – are getting especially noisy. Recent technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are choking these frequencies. To make matters worse, the popular 2.4-GHz band shares space with medical, scientific, and industrial devices, like the huge microwave ovens used to dry plywood.

The soft signs of a growing interference problem are everywhere. Cordless phones in the 2.4-GHz band interfere with Wi-Fi. Until recently, some radar detectors (popular among truckers for spotting police) disrupted terminals used to authorize credit cards at gas stations or pipe Muzak into burger joints.

Some RFI effects are as comical as they are unexpected. Errant radio waves caused mischief on the Spider-Man movie set when emissions from a high-powered walkie-talkie tweaked a timing processor on a generator, killing the lights in the middle of a tear-jerking scene.

Other incidents have been more serious. Six years ago, broadcasts from Dallas-based WFAA, the country's first digital TV station, interfered with wireless heart monitors at Baylor University Medical Center. (The hospital spent $200,000 on new machines.) And last May, a baby monitor hindered air-traffic control communications as pilots approached London's Luton Airport.

Some experts fear this is the leading edge of a spectrum meltdown, but others have high hopes for new technology. Dennis Eaton, chair of the Wi-Fi Alliance, is undaunted by reports of Bluetooth devices hopping all over Wi-Fi connections or interference between overlapping hot spots operating on the same frequency. "I put my faith in the engineers who are designing new equipment," he says.

Eaton may be right. Already, phased-array antennas can make more efficient use of existing spectrum. An approach known as cognitive radio might have an even bigger impact. Unlike your local Top 40 radio station, which transmits 24/7, unlicensed wireless devices tend to use the airwaves intermittently. At any particular moment, the spectrum is rife with unoccupied frequencies, or "white holes." Cognitive radio hunts out these holes and makes temporary use of them. If this technology catches on, every Wi-Fi base station or cordless phone could contain its own little Wesley Sizemore.

Indeed, radios are getting smarter. In January 2003, the US Department of Defense reached an agreement with technology companies requiring manufacturers to enable Wi-Fi devices to detect activity in frequencies used by military radar and, if they sense it, to avoid those parts of the spectrum. FCC rule changes are enabling manufacturers to produce Bluetooth devices that sniff out Wi-Fi signals and dodge them by broadcasting in other frequencies.

Such strategies may ease interference problems in the larger world, but the Quiet Zone is a different matter. Sizemore fears that cognitive radio would allow people to use spectrum bands that previously had been quiet – creating another source of noise rather than a solution. The more the FCC loosens the regulatory reins – allowing cognitive radio, instituting geographic area licensing, opening more spectrum to unlicensed users – the more difficult it becomes to maintain the quiet in the Zone. Even if the outside world does evolve into a laissez-faire commons, as some observers advocate, the Quiet Zone must remain an embattled bastion of command and control.

Sizemore gives me a final spin around the observatory grounds. He looks tired. He drives past one of the smaller radio telescopes, used in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake, who created the famous equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. Sizemore is playing a high-stakes endgame. He's determined to protect this last clear portal to the cosmos. "The Quiet Zone is like a wilderness," he says softly. "Once it's gone, it's gone for good."