A rare island of serenity, thanks to the FCC

While most of us are inundated by sounds of all kinds, folks in one Appalachian region are "zoning out" ... enjoying a rare enclave of serenity. Richard Schlesinger of "48 Hours" has paid them a visit: For anyone who's ever been bothered by the loud ring of a cellphone, or a loud-mouth on a cell phone . . . there's an island of tranquility, if you will, in the West Virginia mountains. Here, most gadgets that transmit aren't just unwelcome, they're BANNED by the federal government. People do live here - they're just hard to reach. The Quiet Zone was set up to protect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a very large and very sensitive radio telescope listening for the faintest of signals from space. "You want to be in a place where there's not interference, so it allows you to hear much fainter signals," said Ethan Schreier, who presides over the telescope. He said the telescope helps us see the effects of general relativity by observing pulsars in orbit around other stars or other pulsars. But it can't do that if somebody's on their cell phone. "That's right," said Schreier. "It would mess up the signals and make it much harder to study." So people here communicate the old-fashioned way, like a pay phone. They're very serious about controlling radio transmissions in The Zone. Chuck Niday showed us the observatory's radio detection truck, loaded with gear that hunts down rogue signals...more