The town of Green Bank, with no mobile phones, TV or wi-fi

THERE'S a town in West Virginia, United States, where you can't use your mobile phone, there's no wi-fi, and your radio dial will never find a signal. 

 
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope (GBT) focuses 2.3 acres of radio light. It is 485ft tall, nearly as tall as the nearby mountains and much taller than pine trees in the national forest. Picture: NRAO/AUI/Wiki Commons

 

Green Bank might sound like hell to some, but the offline community (population 149) has become a mecca for people who say they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, Slatereports.

It's a disease that scientists don't officially recognise, but those who say they suffer from it experience headaches, fatigue and nausea from electromagnetic fields and radiation that are recognised as safe.
So the tiny town sounds like the ideal home for sufferers.

Nestled among mountains, the town is inside the US National Radio Quiet Zone, where electromagnetic radiation is banned, and that includes radio and TV, wi-fi, mobile phone signals and Bluetooth.

The ban is to prevent interference with the world's largest steerable radio telescope, which has a 100m dish and its high sensitivity picks up radio waves from around the universe.

Sufferer Diane Schou told Slate she thought about 36 people had moved to the town to seek refuge from radiation.

news.com.au 12 Aug 2013