>>73289Its low frequency high power, considering the fact they are still alive.
Here is a response i got from the cold war comms yahoo group:
"As a broadcast engineer, I can tell you what is in that video is the vertical tower and the tower base insulator of a high power AM radio station, probably 10 KW or more. The sound you heard was an AM modulated RF arc between the metal of the tower and the conductive material in the stems and leaves of the plant. The flames came from an RF arc between the conductive parts of the plant and the metal of the tower, first drying and then setting fire to the leaves and stems.
Actually, what you saw and heard there is relatively harmless (unless you tried to touch that metal tower yourself) because the RF present is a high enough frequency to be essentially skin effect current only, while also having relatively long wavelength, so the people standing near the tower base do not absorb much of the RF present. My guess is this station is somewhere near 1 MHz. A far more hazardous place to be would be for them to stand that close to an FM transmitting antenna running at 100 MHz with that transmitter power level.
As for getting cancer by proximity to this antenna, the RF field from this antenna is a lot more like being close to a diathermy machine than it is like being close to an X-ray machine. Many radio engineers have spent a lot of time near towers like this, and never experienced ill effects, just as long as they remembered to not try touching the metal of the antenna or the tower base impedance matching network with the transmitter running."
