ARPANSA - Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency

Some members of the public continue to be concerned about  possible health effects of radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic energy (EME) emissions from mobile phone base stations.  Although health authorities around the world, including the World Health Organization, remain of the view that any harmful effects are unproven and unlikely, the public anxiety, itself, is an important issue.  As a result, ARPANSA continues to gather information on actual exposure levels and provides this to the public together with facts about the underlying science.  To date ARPANSA has conducted three surveys of RF from mobile phone base station antennas.

The first ARPANSA survey was conducted in 1999.  At that time the analogue AMPS network was still in operation and the digital GSM networks had only recently been deployed.  Three types of measurements were made:

1. Environmental EME measurements in parks at distances around 500m from the tower (these measurements included broadcast TV and radio signals);
2. 12 to 24 hour monitoring of the mobile phone signals from the target base station; and
3. Mapping the mobile phone signal strength from the tower in the surrounding streets.

In all, 14 base stations were measured during this survey and the results reported in ARPANSA Technical Report 129 [1].

The second survey was carried out in 2003, soon after the introduction of the third generation (3G) mobile phone networks in Australia.  For this survey, consultants measured the mobile phone signals from 60 base stations at distances of 50m, 200m and 500m from the tower and also at the location of the predicted maximum signal strength.  An analysis of the results of this survey was published in the journal Bioelectromagnetics [2].

The most recent measurement campaign began in 2007 and aims to measure several base stations per year.  Great effort is put in to find publicly accessible locations with the highest RF exposure and a series of measurements are then conducted at these locations to ensure that a truly representative measurement is reported.  Details of the rationale for the measurement protocol were presented at the International EMF Conference 2007 in Malaysia [3].  Further measurements are performed at four other locations near the tower: closer, further and to either side of the maximum location.  Preliminary measurements of mobile phone signal strength in the surrounding streets have also been carried out by ARPANSA.  Results from this survey may be found on the ARPANSA website [4].

Citations

1. P. Line, W.A. Cornelius, M.J. Bangay & M. Grollo  Levels of Radiofrequency Radiation from GSM Mobile Telephone Base Stations (PDF 2,000kb), ARPANSA Technical Report 129, ISSN 1443-1505, January 2000.
2. S.I. Henderson & M.J. Bangay   Survey of RF exposure levels from mobile telephone base stations in Australia Bioelectromagnetics Volume 27, Issue 1, Pages 73-76 (2006).
3. L.J. Martin & S.I. Henderson   Radiofrequency Measurements of Mobile Phone Base Stations for Addressing Public Concern in K-H Ng, N.D. Montgomery & L-K Tan (eds.) International EMF Conference 2007 Electromagnetic Fields, Bioeffects Research, Medical Applications and Standards Harmonization Pages 51-54 (2007).
4. ARPANSA Base Station Survey Website of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

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