NF-Huygens & MaxVal. Two new methods for determining the safety distances to base station antennas

In this paper, two different methods of determining the safety distances in the vicinity of mobile phone base stations are presented. The first one applies the Huygen's Principle and is based on near field measurements on a spherical surface, usually performed by antenna manufactures in order to calculate the far field antenna patterns. This method enables the calculation of the field strength outside of the sphere as well as inside. According to a plausibility check this method is quite accurate. As the required measurement data might not be available, a second method called MaxVal is introduced, which is entirely based on the far field antenna patterns. This method requires the number of elements within the antenna. For this reason an estimation technique is provided. The performance and the choice of a parameter are then evaluated with the available measurements.