ELF Magnetic Fields from GSM Handsets 2 Executive Summary

Mobile communication has increased dramatically over the past decade. The GSM Association predicts about 1.5 billion users of the global digital mobile system by mid 2006. The growing concern of the public HAS led to research projects to investigate possible adverse health effects posed by mobile communication. Although the major focus is on RF radiation, some scientists are concerned about the possible impact of combined exposure to RF and ELF fields. Magnetic ELF components are mainly generated by supply currents in the phone. The device with the largest power consumption is the front-end amplifier. Consequently, the corresponding ELF magnetic field has a spectrum similar to the pulse structure of RF signals. The objectives of this study is: • Development of measurement equipment and protocols to accurately assess the ELF fields from mobile phones. • Assessment of the ELF exposure from five representative GSM mobile phones. • Determination of the SAR distribution as well as the spatial peak SAR averaged over 1 g and 10 g. • Development of a setup enabling the exposure of human volunteers with combined RF/ELF fields under worst-case conditions. The deliverables of these objectives are reported in this document. Various approaches have been studied; a measurement setup based on two magnetic field sensors, a Coil probe (ELT-400, NARDA, USA) and a Hall sensor (Gaussmeter 7030, F.W. Bell, USA), mounted on a near-field scanning system (DASY4, SPEAG, Switzerland) has been developed. The B-field sensors an