Extensive frequency selective measurements of radiofrequency fields in outdoor environments performed with a novel mobile monitoring system

Abstract

A novel, car based, measuring system for estimation of general public outdoor exposure to radiofrequency fields (RF) has been developed. The system enables fast, large area, isotropic spectral measurements with a bandwidth covering the frequency range of 30 MHz to 3 GHz. Measurements have shown that complete mapping of a town with 15000 inhabitants and a path length of 115 km is possible to perform within 1 day. The measured areas were chosen to represent typical rural, urban and city areas of Sweden. The data sets consist of more than 70000 measurements. All measurements were performed during the daytime. The median power density was 16 µW/m(2) in rural areas, 270 µW/m(2) in urban areas, and 2400 µW/m(2) in city areas. In urban and city areas, base stations for mobile phones were clearly the dominating sources of exposure.

Use of portable exposimeters to monitor radiofrequency electromagnetic field exposure in the everyday environment

“…In our outdoor microenvironments, exposure from uplink was significantly lower than downlink exposure values in all microenvironments which is in line with previous microenvironmental measurement studies (Estenberg and Augustsson, 2014;Urbinello et al, 2014bUrbinello et al, , 2014c. Our microenvironmental measurements cannot directly be compared with volunteer studies, since in our case the mobile phone of the person carrying the measurement device is turned off.…”

High radiofrequency radiation at Stockholm Old Town: An exposimeter study including the Royal Castle, Supreme Court, three major squares and the Swedish Parliament

“…In 2012, Estenberg and Augustsson (43) used a car-mounted device to measure the frequency range 30–3,000 MHz in public places (rural, urban and large cities). The arithmetic mean measured exposure was 6,700 µW/m 2 in Stockholm, 1,500 µW/m 2 in 4 urban towns and 230 µW/m 2 in 2 rural areas.…”

Prediction of RF-EMF exposure levels in large outdoor areas through car-mounted measurements on the enveloping roads

“…However, recently, various mobile measurement systems have been tested (Bolte et al, 2016;Estenberg and Augustsson, 2014;Tell and Kavet, 2014). For example, Bolte et al (2016) have shown that, although initially built with the purpose of spectrum regulation (CFRS Ltd., 2009;Schiphorst and Slump, 2010), the mobile measurement systems used by the Radiocommunications Agency in the Netherlands, which consists of spectrum analysers with external antennas mounted on cars, are capable of accurately measuring RF exposure over large geographic areas in a relatively short time, potentially making them a suitable tool for large-scale RF-EMF exposure assessment.…”