Fumbling the EMR in the Digital Age

Fumbling the EMR in the Digital Communication Age

By Roman Litovsky, EMC Test Design

            Let me ask you a question - why do we need to know about our RF electromagnetic radiation environment, sometimes called - the EMR?

            We are all used to living carefree and never think about environmental dangers when they are nonexistent.  But occasionally, the situation changes dramatically, like when a Chornobyl accident happened or when an enormous oil spill from a damaged sea tanker. In such situations, we brace ourselves and turn on all our wits and guards - to protect ourselves and our families, hoping that sooner or later the situation will normalize and we will be able to get back to our normal lives.

            Unfortunately, the situation with EMR is dramatically different.  Since science and technology created the wireless revolution, the vast proliferation of cellphones and associated system components of wireless communication technologies kept speeding up almost exponentially.  The inevitable result is - the constant year-to-year increase in EMR around us.          

            Some of it is produced by the devices that we use, like cellphones, wi-fi routers, Bluetooth wireless links, wireless cameras, and video monitors, not forgetting the ubiquitous microwave ovens.  We can shut them down when not in use; we can minimize their operating time to the barebone minimum and hold them at rationally large distances from our bodies.

            But other EMR sources exist everywhere, they serve not only us but the other users, and therefore, they are outside of our immediate control.  In most cases, we even are unaware of their presence, which makes them especially dangerous.  I talk about the remote end of any wireless communication - the cellphone communication towers.  In spite of the fact that the towers in most cases produce EMR levels smaller than our own cellphones that we hold in our hand, they operate 24/7/365, that is - always.  This prolonged exposure of our bodies to the EMR produces very detrimental health effects, depriving us of the ability to fully rest to allow our natural immune and defense systems to take care of all-natural and manmade perils and cancerogenic factors.

            This growing health threat is not going away soon: society's craving for wireless data transfer keeps growing, fueling technology and business development at an unprecedented rate.  The balance between utility benefits and RF safety is, actually, a dynamic one.  From the very beginning, the cellphones were analog, their front ends were not that sensitive and the communication protocols were not robust.  Therefore, the radiating power was much higher than today.

            The technology development created multiple improvements, allowing the cellphone radiating power to be automatically negotiated and minimized (to increase the battery life, not for the RF safety reasons, of course), the new 5G and later technologies offer the sophisticated cellphone tower antenna beaming, sending the EMR in the direction of active cellphones, not everywhere; frequency went higher allowing more data transfer, reducing the data package times.  But at the same time, the use of the devices increased at an even higher rate.  Our cell phones now are always active, even when we don't use them - they have become the data collecting spy centers always talking to the towers, whether we want it or not.

            The technological progress created another chain of events: the EMR at higher frequencies propagates like a light beam, meaning that the tower and its correspondents must directly "see" each other.  Any structures absorb the EMR, thus requiring the cellphone towers to be placed almost every 300 feet from each other to provide continuous service coverage. 

To ease the visual burden, the smart cellphone communication providers started hiding the transmitting antennas, placing them behind the common plastic screens (street and store signs, fake partitions), or camouflaging them as trees, lamp poles, and even as brick walls.  Such micro towers now are placed anywhere - you may be relaxing in a chair in front of the street cafe or just walking on the street, looking at it directly not knowing that you are in the EMR beam initiated by the callers around you.

            Well, as a law-believing citizen, you may be thinking that all these EMR encounters must be safe.  It would be illegal to subject the population to unhealthy EMR levels, right? We live in a democratic society and such a situation should be unthinkable. But unfortunately, your EMR safety, especially, when the detrimental health effects are elusive and long term, is not the main priority of the government compared with the massive push of the telecommunication industry to speed up the new technologies development, creating progress and bringing pride, employment and substantial prosperity to the society.

            But where do we stand in terms of compliance with the real EMR levels around us and the established EMR safety standards? It was in 1969 when the FCC adopted the OET Bulletin 65, "Evaluating Compliance with FCC Guidelines for Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields" which specified the exposure limits for both occupational personnel and the general public. 

The limits were calculated based on thermal heating produced by the EMR (about 0.1 C°) and they are frequency-dependent to account for the physics of EMR absorption and possible RF resonances when the RF wavelength is comparable to the human height or to the size of typical living structures.  Above 2 GHz the "safe" power density for the general population was 1 mW/cm2. In spite of the fact that there have been dramatic changes in technology during the last sixty-five years, the limits specified on the plots here are still used today as an official RF safety limit.

            What exactly has changed and why do we believe that these limits are not adequate to protect us from the long-term effects of the EMR?  When these limits were established the only EMR in abundance were the AM/FM/TV stations plus the microwave pulsed radars used by the air traffic control centers to track the airplanes. The last ones were typically located far away from the main population centers and were very directional, facing the skies and presenting rather low danger for humans.  The AM stations were operating in the relatively low-frequency range from 150KHz up to about 30 MHz, all analog, and their RF human body absorption was low - this corresponds to a 100 times rise of the FCC safety limit at the frequencies below 30 MHz on Fig. 1 above.  FM broadcast stations, while operating in a very sensitive frequency range of 87-120 MHz, were using FM modulation, so their human-body interaction is not different from the CW (Continuous Wave) signals.  Finally, most TV broadcasting went to cable or satellite dishes, both practically eliminating the extra EMR exposure.

            And then, the era of digital communications started. Instead of CW signals, most transmitters now radiate short RF pulses with various durations and repetition rates. The carrier frequencies went up to 800 MHz and higher up 6 GHz, going up to 40 GHz - 90 GHz in the future.  In the beginning, nobody expected a problem. But soon some people started developing medical conditions from suspicious headaches, fatigue, and insomnia - to much more severe ones like head tumors, in most cases correlated with the places where cellphones were held.

            But the most shocking was the fact that some people experienced the detrimental EMR health effects at levels as small as 1/100 or even 1/10,000 from the established FCC RF safety levels.  This syndrome was called EHS (Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity) and for a few decades, most medical professionals didn't believe in it. Instead, the common view was that the EHS sufferers were people with some mental problems or, at least with many other health problems, falsely attributed to the EMR. No one wanted to believe in the direct link between low-level EMR and health.

            Of course, the telecommunication industry didn't hold itself accountable - all electronic products at the time complied with applicable safety laws.  But this was a small consolation to suffering victims. An official medicine initially did not accept EMR-induced illnesses until 2011 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) adopted the classification of radiofrequency fields (RF) as Group 2B on the IARC scale of carcinogenic risk to humans. The 2B classification meant that the factor was cancerogenic but the true mechanism of the phenomenon is still unclear. That was a step in the right direction, but still, a slap in the face of millions of people whose health was at risk, all after hundreds of research papers and studies were performed demonstrating a direct link between long-term EMR exposure and human illnesses. 

            I will not discuss the medical research studies, interested readers should go to reputable websites having huge archives of information.  To name a few: www.ehtrust.org, www.microwavenews.com.

            But for the sake of common sense, I present a few reasons why the abundance of EMR, and especially, the pulsed electromagnetic fields may present a formidable health danger:

            - Our bodies are constructed from cells, separated from each other by the cell membranes.  There are a lot of physiological processes in the body that are electrical. The nerves' internal communication is in nature electric too. When pulsed EMR is absorbed, it gets "rectified" by the nonlinear conducting cells and their boundaries, creating the detected envelope representing the demodulated electrical signal with a frequency spectrum from 1 Hertz to 1 MHz.  These signals interfere with natural body communication, like brain wave rhythms and other inherent resonances, disrupt normal body functions, and create health problems after long-term exposure. Such non-thermal effects of EMR can occur practically at any level, even those that are much smaller than the established FCC RF safety ones, see here: EUROPAEM.   Their study is very complicated because it is almost impossible to create human reference subjects that are not affected by the adverse elements, including the natural ionizing radiation, cancerogenic chemicals, or sun UV.  Therefore, most of the studies were done on biological objects and small animals.  Extrapolation of the findings to humans has always been a sticking point, but the main result is still the same - very low EMR at levels as small as 1/100,000 of the FCC safety level can cause measurable physiological changes in living objects. Here I present an oversimplified picture, but it still demonstrates why digitally modulated RF signals can be more dangerous for our health than CW ones (causing only thermal effects at high levels).

            - When the RF carrier frequencies went up by 10-100 times, the human body penetration depth (defined as 3-5 times the so-called - Skin Depth) was reduced by more than 10 times (Skin Depth goes down when the frequency goes up). For the same RF power density, this increased the RF absorbed power in the surface adjacent body tissues by a factor of more than 10.  So, the same amount of energy is now absorbed by a much smaller volume, causing the increased heating at high EMR levels and the disruption of the electric nerve communication due to a non-thermal effect at much lower EMR levels.  Future increase of the carrier frequency by another order of magnitude will result in the RF power absorption in the very thin skin tissue, affecting significantly the eyes and genitals.

            - The main argument of the EMR cancerogenic effects deniers was that the energy of the quanta of the electromagnetic field at any frequency, even at 90 GHz, is not enough to knock the electrons from the molecules, thus - incapable of changing the DNK that is responsible for cancer cell formation.  This is a vivid example of how smart people with a background in physics and electronics could make a grave mistake when rationalizing medicine and physiology.  There is convincing research proving that EMR at sub-thermal levels can affect the natural flow of electrons and protons in our body and alter the biochemistry of physiological processes, thus creating the basis for multiple health problems, see here: Paul Heroux.  Then, it becomes clear that the high quanta energy of EMR for dramatic disruption of normal body functions is not necessary. Also, the EMR can interfere with the body's immune system's "repair mechanisms," disrupting the protection from many other harmful elements of nature (ionizing radiation, toxic chemicals, UV) doing the DNK damage.  The complicated interaction of EMR with human body physiology explains why it was so difficult to pinpoint the link between EMR exposure and cancer cell formation.  It also explains the link between the EMR and multiple disorders of the human immune system experienced by people, like body intoxication, the syndromes of fibromyalgia, and EHS - closely related to impaired immune system operation.

The long-term health effects of EMR at levels much smaller than the FCC RF safety standard is a proven fact. But why do we still have these inadequate standards? 

That is a question not for me but for the FCC.  I may only offer my opinion:  Today most of the cellphones are barely meeting the FCC RF safety levels (measured by the SAR - a Specific Absorption Rate), so making the RF standards more stringent would outlaw our beloved communication devices overnight.  If these cellphones and corresponding cellphone tower transmitters reduce their radiating power - wireless communication will be severely impaired. Nobody has the guts to do it. If you are technical and already thinking - let’s, make cellphones more sensitive, I must disappoint you: the great engineers have been working on these issues for the last twenty years.  What we have today is the present state of the art.

But what are the EMR levels that today's science deems to be safe in the long term?  

It is a complicated question and there is still an argument between different researchers. 

I lean to the following numbers: The EMR levels below 0.01% or 1/10,000 from the 1 mW/cm2 (the FCC RF safety level for the general public above 2 GHz) are long-term safe. This was recently demonstrated by epidemiological studies in EU countries.  The numbers above are the "averaged" EMR power density measurements.  Peak values for the cellphone type digital communication are 5-10 times higher.

Where do we get this safety level? 

Such levels are typically found at distances, greater than 300-500 meters from modern cell towers.  Some countries now are adopting this rule for urban development. 

But what if you live closer to the cellphone tower?  How should you treat the EMR levels produced by your home RF sources like cell phones and Wi-Fi routers?

The chart below represents my present view on the RF safety levels.

So, what can we do to ensure our EMR safety?

Actually, a lot. Here I will list some major common-sense measures everyone can take to reduce the EMR long-term risks:

- Keep your cell phones away from your body, especially, when you use them actively.  Always use a speakerphone.

- Using wired earbuds or a Bluetooth earbud may still be risky, depending on how much RF energy goes through the connecting cable and how much RF power the Bluetooth earbud radiates - it is inside your ear! The RF power density in some spots inside your ear may still be high.

- Minimize the use of cell phones.  When streaming the music and videos do not keep the cell phone on your body.  When carrying the cell phone, use the RF absorbing pouch.  The pouch typically produces 20-40 dB of attenuation - enough to protect yourself from non-working cellphone EMR.

- Place your Wi-Fi router in the corner of your apartment or house, away from the bedroom and common places.  Find the router RF power setting in the menu and use the lowest power setting that still gives you a stable internet connection.

-  Do not keep your head near MW while using.  Three to five feet distance will make it safe.

-  Take away all RF-emitting devices from your children.  This includes baby monitors and iPads.  Kids don't need them for good development anyway.

- Don't forget - the Apple Watch for kids and similar devices are the same cellphones with reduced functionality, permanently attached to the kids’ arms. We still don't know what health dangers they may present in the long run.

- Find out which devices and where radiate the highest levels of EMR. Study your EMR environment: check the kids' school, daycare center, your place of work - don't assume that EMR over there is low: I found the places where I walk and shop regularly that have the levels of EMR 1000 times (!) higher than the RF safe level of 0.01%.

- Examine your home.  Make sure that the places where you and your family spend the most of your time have the lowest possible levels of EMR.  If you find that the EMR is coming from the outside - use mitigation techniques, like painting the walls and room ceilings with conductive paint and covering the infringing windows with transparent EMR reflecting film.

- Use a precautionary principle: the less EMR, the better!

But the most important is - educate yourselves and your family members about RF electromagnetic safety

and make sure that you and your kids naturally follow the safe EMR practices: this may save your lives in the future.

In order to measure the EMR levels you need the test instrument that you can trust.  My company, EMC Test Designhas been in the business of designing RF Field Meters for more than 30 years and our products were mostly used by RF professionals.  I felt that we needed to create a new type of RF safety meter - one that can be very portable, easy to use, covering the whole RF spectrum of all existing and future wireless communication technologies, and be affordable to the general public.

            After seven years of exploration and design, we finally created the one that we are proud of RF GuardÒ Pro. We created it the way we like it, offering the user non-stop EMR awareness.  The device consumes so little power that it can be turned on and forgotten. The battery will last for months.  If you encounter elevated EMR levels the device will alert you by the variable pitch sound, multicolor LED, and the LCD, allowing you to measure the Average, Peak, and Peak/Hold level of RF power density in % relative to 1 mW/cm2).

Detailed information about RF GuardÒ Pro is presented below:

You can buy it now right here from our safe website!