There are no physical signs you've entered the
National Radio Quiet Zone,
a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West
Virginia. But the silence gives you a signal. Somewhere around the
Virginia-West Virginia state line, the periodic buzzes and pings of our
smartphones stopped.
"Zero [service]. Searching," said photographer John Poole, who traveled with me to the zone.
Almost every radio station disappeared, too, except for
Allegheny Mountain Radio, which broadcasts at a low enough frequency to avoid being banned.
"We
didn't realize the rest of the world was getting connected and staying
connected constantly, via phones and computers and all that," said radio
host Caleb Diller, who grew up in Pocahontas County, W.Va. "So we were
kinda back in time a little bit. We hadn't progressed to that."
The
county still hasn't progressed to constant connectivity. That's because
it sits within a zone designed to protect a sophisticated radio
telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from interference.
The
Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.
Radio
telescopes work by tracking and reading the energy waves that come from
stars or gases, but they have to be located in sparsely populated areas
to avoid electromagnetic interference.
The Green Bank Telescope
looks like a giant dish. It's as tall as the Washington Monument and
large enough to fit 2 acres of land in it.
"It's a huge
collecting area and it's what allows us to see these incredibly small
energies that we're trying to study," says Karen O'Neil, who oversees
the site. "The types of energies we look at are less than the energy of a
single snowflake falling on the earth."
The energy of Wi-Fi or
cell signals can confuse or interfere with the telescope's readings —
and it can trip the receivers at the government's nearby
Sugar Grove research facility, which is also in the zone.
"Because
we're looking at these very, very faint signals, we need to live in a
very, very quiet area. In the same way where if you had an optical
telescope, it needs to be high on the mountain away from other light,"
O'Neil says.
So a federal quiet zone law and an accompanying state law — the
West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zoning Act — combine to keep the area very radio quiet. No interference is allowed.
"We
still have communications. I mean, it's just ... older. Dial-up
telephones. We still have phone booths," says Chuck Niday, an engineer
for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a volunteer at
Allegheny Mountain Radio.
Emergency communications are allowed in
the zone, as is ham radio, a hobby among a set of West Virginians who
chitchat or coordinate plans over their ham radios as they would their
cellphones — if they had cellphones.
"Last year the big windstorm
we had, we were without power for some days. And without a lot of
communications. All the phone lines were down, so we had different spots
around the county where we could talk from one end of the county to the
other, and maybe relay about a store being open or somewhere having
ice," said Pat Schaffner, a Green Bank native.
To keep the zone
protected from signals that could confuse the telescope, Niday and
others from the NRAO drive the 20-mile radius around the Green Bank
Telescope weekly, policing for possible interference.
"Say
someone has a Wi-Fi service set up near the observatory that's causing
us interference, we can ask them to shut it off and most of the time
they do," he says.
But keeping the noise down around here is getting harder these days.
"If
you think back to 1956 when this site was first built, there were
issues with radio noise, but most of those issues came about through
cars and spark plugs and power lines. And now we're living in a society
where everything is wireless," O'Neil says.
And constant
connectivity has become a consumer and cultural demand, as one of the
biggest employers in the county — Snowshoe Ski Resort — knows well. The
resort happens to sit right inside the Quiet Zone. On busy weekends, it
hosts as many out-of-towners as there are residents in Pocahontas
County. So Murphy has to get creative to get customers cell service
without running afoul of the astronomers.
"We have to find a way to communicate that doesn't interfere with them," says George Murphy, Snowshoe's IT director.
This
summer, Murphy got a system of shoebox-size antennas installed in the
resort's retail village. Using something called DAS technology, which
involves short-range cell receivers, he brought cellphone service to a
pocket of Snowshoe for the first time ever.
"This was huge," he
says of the limited cell service. "From the day I started here, I was
working on this project with several different companies."
Change
seems to be in the mountain air. But for most of the area, life remains
slower paced. Instant messaging and texting remain something Niday sees
on television and when he travels out of state.
"It's nice to be
able to pull something out of your pocket and send a message to someone
and get a response within 30 seconds or so. But I don't know that it's
that necessary. At least it's not around here," he says.
Around here, folks seem content to stay disconnected. At least for now.