Exposure Safety Assessment of GSM base station antennas - RF Cafe Forums

The original RF Cafe Forums were shut down in late 2012 due to maintenance issues - primarily having to spend time purging garbage posts from the board. At some point I might start the RF Cafe Forums again if the phpBB software gets better at filtering spam.

Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts.

-- Amateur Radio
-- Anecdotes, Gripes & Humor
-- Antennas
-- CAE, CAD, & Software
-- Circuits & Components
-- Employment & Interviews

-- Miscellany
-- Swap Shop
-- Systems
-- Test & Measurement
-- Webmaster

midea11

Post subject: Exposure Safety Assessment of GSM base station antennas

Posted: Sun May 09, 2010 6:46 am

Lieutenant

Joined: Sun May 09, 2010 6:38 am
Posts: 1

Hi, does anyone know how to carry out an RF survey for an exposure assessment. It's my final year project and i'm kinda lost on how to do it.

nubbage

Post subject: Re: Exposure Safety Assessment of GSM base station antennas

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 9:17 am

General

Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:07 pm
Posts: 236
Location: London UK

Hi
There are several approaches to this, depending on your location and your project budget.
There are possibilities to short-term hire either a bespoke EMI/EMR radiation monitor test set, which often comes complete with a useful treatise on the technology to guide you thru the measurements, or a more Do It Yourself approach is to obtain or hire a battery-portable spectrum analyzer covering the GSM frequency range (800 to 1900MHz), then make your own brodband antenna. The latter usually takes the form of a log-periodic yagi antenna. Standard reference text books cover the inter-conversion of different electromagnetic field strength quantities such as dBm, microvolts per square carrot etc.
Measurements are made at fixed intervals, a typical starting point being either 3 or 10 meters from the antenna being studied.
There are international standards for the safety limits published by the International Telecom Union (ITU-R), the IEC and others, as well as government legal limits. These usually define the technical terms and show diagrams of what is involved. A web search will reveal all these for you.
I may have some refernces myself, but I am away from base for a while at present.

_________________
At bottom, life is all about
Sucking in and blowing out.

Kirt Blattenberger

Post subject: Re: Exposure Safety Assessment of GSM base station antennas

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 2:33 pm

Site Admin

Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 451
Location: Erie, PA

Greetings mideall:

Ham radio control operators are required to conduct radiation exposure surveys under some station conditions, so there is a plethora of information in layman's language on how to carry out evaluations on the ARRL website.

http://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure

_________________
- Kirt Blattenberger :smt024

RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster

Posted 11/12/2012