Public safety assessment of electromagnetic radiation exposure from mobile base stations

Abstract

Exposure of the general public to electromagnetic radiation originating from randomly selected GSM/WCDMA base stations in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been assessed in the context of the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guidelines. The purpose of the measurement was to record the maximum power density of signals to estimate possible worst case exposure at each measurement location. These power density measurements were carried out at 60 mobile base stations located in different regions of the city. For each of these sites, three sectors were operational, yielding a total of 180 sectors. Two positions were identified per site with the greatest power density values. Exposures from these base stations were generally found to be in the range of 0.313 to 0.00000149% of the ICNIRP general public reference level, and the greatest exposure near any of the base stations was 21.96 mW m(-2) for a wideband measurement in the 75-3000 MHz frequency range. Analysis of the measured data reveals several trends for different mobile bands with respect to maximum exposure in those locations. Additionally, a simplified calculation method for the electromagnetic fields was used to compare calculated and the measured data. It was determined, on the basis of both results of the measurements and calculations carried out for these selected base stations, that members of the public would not be exposed to in excess of a small fraction of the ICNIRP guidelines at any of those sites. These are first such measurements to be made in the Middle East and provide assurance that exposures in this region of the world do not seem to be any greater than elsewhere.

National surveys of radiofrequency field strengths from radio base stations in Africa

“…The ICNIRP limit, median level per service for the South African data and the number of times below the ICNIRP limit are shown in Table 5. In Table 6 the findings were compared for the South African measurements of mobile services with the results from a 16-country pooled analysis (1) , France (23) and recently published data for mobile services from a geographically diverse selection of countries: China (24) (and the associated online Supplementary data ), Iran (25) , Saudi Arabia (26) and the West Bank Palestine (20) . The spread of values is typical of the range observed in the larger set of 23 countries and relates to factors such as measurement equipment and choice of measurement location (1) .…”

“… e Calculated from the reported (26) average exposure quotient of 0.0136 % and using the limit value of 450 µW cm −2 .…”

A Technical Approach to the Evaluation of Radiofrequency Radiation Emissions from Mobile Telephony Base Stations

“…With his colleagues, he established that each antenna (using the GSM-900, GSM-1800 and UMTS-2100 technologies) creates unequal RF EMR values at particular frequencies [42]. His group established that 20%, 40%, and 40% of the total RF EMR is contributed by mobile antennas (ERP—800 W, height = 30 m) in the 900, 1800, and 2100 MHz bands, respectively.…”

“…This is influenced by the environment that surrounds the mobile antenna: the 900 MHz frequency band is used more often in rural areas and rarely in populated areas, whereas the 1800 and 2100 MHz frequency bands are used more often in densely populated cities. Alhekail investigated mobile antennas [42] in the densely populated city of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (where the distance between the antenna and residential buildings was 50 m, while in the present study the distance between the antenna and residential buildings was 200 m). Usually, in the monitoring of field measurements, each antenna generating RF EMR is investigated separately, but the total RF EMR created by two mobile antennas has not been evaluated.…”

“…RF EMR produced by antennas for mobile telephony can be experimentally measured with the help of different software applications employed to simulate the reference values of RF EMR [42]. The simulation of the RF EMR of mobile telephony includes the analysis of one or several different antennas emitting RF EMR, which would be difficult or impossible to research in normal conditions, using their emission models [43,44,45].…”