Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am planning on doing an experiment for science fair that requires EMR frequencies from a cell phone to be measured. Are there any specific tools that can help me do this?

Thanks

What are you looking to measure? The frequencies or the field strength? The equipment involved may be very different depending on what you're looking for. I'm going to guess you're interested in how much energy leaks into your head when you hold the phone to your ear. In that case you need an EMF meter and there are all sorts of them out there, starting below $200 and going up into the thousands.

Looking about at random I found a site that talks about how to stay safe from EMF (http://www.lessemf.com/faq-mete.html) and they suggest the problem will be that inexpensive meters are designed to read fields from a few feet away. You need one with near-field capability. Their suggestion is to use a 'near-field probe' with a standard meter. I'm not recommending for or against this since i haven't done the measurement myself - you need to do some research on how people test EMF from cellphones and see what kind of testing you can come up with.

People also use EMF meters in parapsychology to hunt ghosts so that's another possible source for equipment.

Hi juicyc17,

If you look at the materials list for this Science Buddies project:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p068.shtml

it links to a website where you can rent a radio frequency meter for a couple weeks. Like HowardE said, a "good" meter can be very expensive to buy, so renting one might be a better option for a science project.

-Ben