It’s a Tall Tale: Antennas Assuming Secret Identities

Soon, a tree will be planted here unlike any other.

It will have branches and needles and will blend in with the pine trees at the Church of Christ at Felipe Road and Marguerite Parkway.

But unlike its organic cousins, this 40-foot evergreen’s trunk will be metal, and it will receive digital electronic signals from thousands of mobile phone owners.

In communities where the sight of 60-foot metallic poles looming in the sky is unwelcome, telecommunications firms responsible for the new generation of digital mobile phones are finding innovative ways to make sure people cannot see the antenna for the forest.

Drivers buzzing down the San Diego Freeway pass the Irvine Spectrum without a clue that the business park’s monumental sign doubles as an antenna. That large pastel box on the roof of the Laguna Hills Mall? Yep, a telecommunications device.

Throughout Southern California, antennas are being disguised as palm trees and blended into working clock towers, light poles, traffic signals and church signs.

“Their creativity is pretty amazing,” said Charles Wilson, a Mission Viejo city planner. “They need to be, because, quite frankly, those monopoles [as standard transmission towers are called] are pretty ugly.”

Since January, surprised cities have been flooded with applications for new antennas, sparked by a 1995 Federal Communications Commission decision that allowed telecommunications giants such as Pacific Bell and Cox Communications to market a new digital technology called PCS, or personal communications services.

PCS has allowed companies to develop digital mobile phones with a far clearer signal than the current analog system and to include such features as paging and anti-theft coding. Some firms expect to begin marketing these new products in Southern California by the end of December.

But as the companies raced to erect antennas capable of transmitting the new signals, cities like Laguna Hills, which normally would receive a handful of requests in a year, got more than 50 monopole applications by June of this year. Caught without guidelines or standards for the conventional towers, municipalities, including Tustin and Lake Forest, imposed moratoriums on new antennas until city codes could be updated.

And when the first plans for antennas made it to planning commission and city council meetings, another battle was engaged. Concerned about the alleged health implications of the electromagnetic fields surrounding the antennas, residents poured into public meetings to oppose construction of monopoles near homes and playgrounds.

Telecommunications companies maintain that the frequencies employed in telecommunications are not hazardous to human health, and federal law prohibits cities from rejecting an antenna project on the basis of EMFs. But with hundreds of applications pending throughout Southern California, telecommunications firms backed down in several instances and looked for other sites.

Last week, AirTouch Cellular agreed to take down a cellular phone tower at El Morro Elementary School in Laguna Beach. Angry parents concerned about EMFs had filed a lawsuit against the company.

“It’s a sore spot with the company,” said AirTouch Cellular site manager Larry Levine. “It hasn’t been proven anywhere that EMFs harm anyone. But it just gets to a point where it doesn’t make sense to convince someone whether they’re right or wrong.”

Doug Crozier, a member of Mission Viejo Christian Church, whose congregation successfully opposed a proposal to build an antenna next to their playground last summer, said the group didn’t want to take any risks, no matter how small or large.

“The studies are inconclusive to whether [EMFs] are causing a problem,” he said. “We’re not sure, but we didn’t want to take chances with our children.”

Locating antennas away from populated areas was still a problem, because local officials generally recoiled at the idea of monopoles dotting the landscape. So the telecommunications companies became inventive: “We look at the topography and geography of the site and try to come up with a creative design,” said Martha Ann Zajic, public affairs manager for Cox Communications, which has installed transmitters on top of flagpoles.

Proposals to install the antennas in residential areas still require notification of residents and public hearings. But those proposed for uninhabited areas can be approved by planning officials without hearings--if those officials agree that they won’t be an eyesore.

Camouflage comes at a price, however.

Two varieties of metal trees, palm and pine, are marketed by a Midwest electronics company. Price tag: about $150,000.

Levine said disguising a transmission site can cost up to $750,000. But the alternative is a higher rate of “dropped” calls, phone connections that are lost when travelers move from one signal area to another.

“Customer satisfaction is important to us,” Levine said. “When a trouble spot needs some help, you do what you have to do.”