Response to comment on “personal digital assistant (PDA) cell phone units produce elevated extremely-low frequency electromagnetic field emissions”

✍ Scribed by Cindy Sage; Olle Johansson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 39 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0197-8462
• DOI: 10.1002/bem.20351

✦ Synopsis

RF antenna has any meaning. We strongly recommend against using standard ELF scientific instruments to measure ELF fields in these near field RF environments. We have seen a similar type of interference in RF survey and RF personal monitoring instruments caused by strong ELF electric fields [Olsen and Yamazaki, 2005], and we are aware of an earlier epidemiology study in Canada using different ELF instruments that reported walkie-talkie RF interference [Maruvada et al., 2000]. Another important issue is that the geometry of the EMDEX sensor coils is probably large with respect to a tiny/localized ELF source within the PDA and spatial field averaging occurs. The EMDEX Lite's three orthogonal coils are spaced at 1-2 cm apart and the EMDEX II coils are at 3-4 cm apart. Finally, we are not sure of the difference in battery current draw (and resulting ELF) on European 2 W devices and US 0.6 W devices. Given the widespread use of mobile phones and PDAs and because they may present a source of ELF exposure [Mezei et al., 2001] proper characterization of ELF fields produced by mobile phones and PDAs is appropriate, but must be approached with care and an assessment of potential instrumentation limitations.