Section 5.6 · Further exercises · 14 of 20
Exercise 5.6.14: Checking an exposure limit with a loop probe
About the further exercises of Section 5.6
Twenty further exercises in the spirit of the problems, the worked examples and the home exercises, graded from easy to harder within two groups. Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.10 belong to the lecture: Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.2 are about phasors and the phase velocity, 5.6.3–5.6.5 about the complex permittivity and the wave number, 5.6.6–5.6.7 about the Helmholtz equation and 5.6.8–5.6.10 about power. Exercises 5.6.11–5.6.20 belong to the exercise lecture: reading time-harmonic fields, loops, mixers and receivers, power, and the medium found from measurements. They use only
and, from Section 6.1, the instantaneous and the complex Poynting vectors and , with , and the time-harmonic Poynting relation
with the time-average energy densities and (real , ). For a wave every becomes , so Faraday's law gives . A small loop of turns and area in a field of angular frequency picks up an emf of amplitude , with its normal.
Checking an exposure limit with a loop probe
#A field meter uses a one-turn loop of radius . Near a mobile-phone base station, at , with the loop turned for the largest reading, it shows an rms emf of . Assume a single plane wave in air. (a) Is the loop small? (b) Find the rms values of and and the power density. (c) Compare with the ICNIRP reference level for the general public between and , with in MHz. (d) The loop is turned by from the best orientation. What does it read? Show that three orthogonal loops, combined as , read the same in any orientation.
A small loop measures : . In a plane wave in air , and the power density is in rms values, which is in amplitudes.
and . The correction factor of Problem 5.6.6 is : the small-loop formula is good to .
, so
The reference level at is , so the measured field is at of it. In field strength the level corresponds to , and .
Turned by , falls by : the meter reads and would report , a quarter of the truth. With three loops of orthonormal normals ,
since the are the components of in the basis .
.
Commercial isotropic probes use exactly three orthogonal sensors, loops for and short dipoles for . The conversion holds only in the far field of the antenna, about a wavelength or more away. Close to an antenna and must be measured separately.
cf. Problem 5.6.6