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FCC Says iPhone Didn't Exceed Radiofrequency Radiation Safety Levels

You can move the goalposts all you want, but the only goalposts that matter are the ones used by the regulatory agencies.

You can argue that their goalposts are not realistic, but then you need actual data that show their goalposts aren't realistic. There's an actual process for setting those goalposts. Whether the process comes up with real-world goalposts is unclear, and it's probably not something the Chicago Tribune or a law firm want to dig into, since they most likely don't have a lot of expertise in that area.

This has turned into another story like Bloomberg's "Chinese Chips Infiltrated America's Motherboard Manufacturers and Are Spying On You."

The Chinese don't need to implant chips on motherboards to spy on everyone. They can just buy an advertising firm.
 
coolfactor said:
Despite being "safe", long-term exposure of any form of radiation must have an effect, and likely affects different people in different ways. I'm not saying that using a mobile phone is risky, but to say that risk is "zero" for everyone in every circumstance is a copout. Those that sleep for 8 hours with their phone next to their heads are putting themselves at a potential risk. Nobody can dispute that. Radiation is radiation.
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Do you have any peer-reviewed scientific data to support your assertion?
 
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Well this will certainly make a lawsuit harder for that firm, but not impossible. The burden of proof will be higher on the Plaintiff, since the Defense can show they followed the FCC regulation standard.
 
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Vjosullivan said:
If you have evidence that their measurements were faulty then you should publish it. Otherwise, you claim is indistinguishable form fan-boy talk.
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The evidence is that the original design, certification, and FCC's retest showed the devices were safe. The logical conclusion is that the media-sponsored results were incorrect. The same situation occurred over multiple, independent tests with different handsets from different manufacturers.

Basic logic, not "fan-boy talk".

Vjosullivan said:
The vaccine fiasco was demonstrated to be faulty science and dodgy inferences.
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You missed my point completely. The point is simply "don't publish wrong results". Again, this is basic scientific and engineering ethics.

Vjosullivan said:
That would be statistics then.
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You still missed the point. The tests are n=1 tests. The only statistics involved in the SAR tests are uncertainty characterization, which is a datasheet exercise. They pick the max reading anyway.
 
So, IlI was under the impression that all new electronic products had to pass the FCC scrutiny anyways. So would it had not already been tested for these so-called highlevels ??
 
MRI3T said:
So, IlI was under the impression that all new electronic products had to pass the FCC scrutiny anyways. So would it had not already been tested for these so-called highlevels ??
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This is how it works in the US: the OEM obviously does design analysis and their own pre-tests. Once satisfied, they send the unit to an independent accredited test lab. The test lab provides results, which are sent to a third party called the telecommunications certification body, TCB. The TCB checks the paperwork and reports and approves the product on behalf of the FCC. The FCC conducts audits of the work, including retests in its own lab.

In the EU, there's several less steps: they send it to a single "notified body" who does the tests and declares approval.

That's why the media's results were unbelievable. The newspaper claimed that many different phones from different manufacturers tested by different test labs and overseen by multiple TCBs were wrong, based on the results of a single test lab hired by the newspaper.
 
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Vjosullivan said:
No. It really doesn't. It reads like a newspaper decided (quite legitimately) to do its own investigations into mobile phone radio frequency emissions and compare their results with the FCC. They found that some phones appear to exceed those levels. Perhaps not surprising since lab testing is not as exact science as the public want to believe and a lot of statistical analysis (the most fragile form of maths) is involved.

Naturally, the manufacturers who lost out objected to the results because they already had FCC approval.

The FCC re-examines their figures and/or re-performs the tests and finds that their results are consistent and that mobile phone emissions are within limits.

So, it turns out that democracy is alive and working. Everybody is doing their job correctly and mobile phones are currently meeting their current legal requirements.

No need for stupid conspiracy theories and invisible "foreign forces".
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This is a post 2016 election world. If you think foreign interests stopped interfering with our lives when the election ended, you need to pull your head out from the sand.
 
coolfactor said:
Despite being "safe", long-term exposure of any form of radiation must have an effect, and likely affects different people in different ways.
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Nonsense. And why they "SCARE QUOTES" around the word safe? The radiation emitted from the iPhone is weaker than that form of radiation known as the earth's magnetic field -- you know -- that ever present force that makes compasses point north. So anyone concerned about how "unsafe" their phone is should probably consider that there are far, far larger natural emitters of radiation all around us, all of which have effects ranging from zero to negligible.
 
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konqerror said:
To nitpick, non-ionizing radiation can be just as hazardous. Stick your head in a microwave oven. For ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, it's all down to the scientifically accepted safety limits.



Not at all. The original test lab and professional engineers that produced the paper's results should face sanctions and possibly a loss of their accreditation and license. They did a faulty measurement and signed off on it. If they report something as way too high, by a factor of 2-3, how do we know that they aren't going report something too low by the same factor?

Basic professional ethics: incorrect results and conclusions weaken the public's confidence in science and engineering. Just look at vaccines.



There isn't much statistical analysis involved, just characterization of uncertainty. If the uncertainty was such that a wrong conclusion was probable, then the measurements should be repeated, or a different method devised, until an incorrect conclusion was improbable. At the very least, the conclusion should be "we don't know" not "the iPhone is unsafe".

Use of statistical techniques does not justify error. Quite the opposite, statistics gives you the tools so that instead of stating a firm conclusion, you can state what the chances of an erroneous conclusion are.
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Except the microwave oven is a million times more powerful and a different frequency than a mobile phone.
 
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Sedulous said:
Except the microwave oven is a million times more powerful and a different frequency than a mobile phone.
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Great job reading the second sentence of the post. It's not "a million", it's a factor of roughly 300. And the second statement is wrong too, LTE Bands 1, 30, 40, and 41 are within 10% of the frequency of a microwave oven.
 
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konqerror said:
Great job reading the second sentence of the post. It's not "a million", it's a factor of roughly 300. And the second statement is wrong too, LTE Bands 1, 30, 40, and 41 are within 10% of the frequency of a microwave oven.
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Within 10% is still a different frequency, and a factor of 300 is a pretty big difference too.
 
konqerror said:
Great job reading the second sentence of the post. It's not "a million", it's a factor of roughly 300. And the second statement is wrong too, LTE Bands 1, 30, 40, and 41 are within 10% of the frequency of a microwave oven.
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More accurately, power is always controlled down from the maximum output (1W), with a power control dynamic range of 63 db. At full power control, (minimum power) the output is -33dbm, or .000005watts, or .5 micro watts. Most microwave ovens run at around 1000W. At max power, the microwave oven is still 1000x the max operating power and 2,000,000,000x minimum power of a cell phone. Since I do not know how transmission power changes during operation, let’s just say an average of the min/max: 1,000,000,500x the power of the average consumer microwave oven.

That is not how RF works. Things usually efficiently absorb a narrow band of spectrum. 10% of the frequency (whatever that means) is not 90% the same. The frequency difference between cell phones and microwave ovens is significant enough to have different interactions with “stuff”. If what you said were true, cell phones could not work when it was raining or even mildly humid.
 
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Sedulous said:
More accurately, power is always controlled down from the maximum output (1W), with a power control dynamic range of 63 db. At full power control, (minimum power) the output is -33dbm, or .000005watts, or .5 micro watts. Most microwave ovens run at around 1000W. At max power, this is still 1000x the max operating power and 2,000,000,000x minimum power. Since I do not know how transmission power changes during operation, let’s just say an average of the min/max: 1,000,000,500x the power of the average consumer microwave oven.
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Incorrect. A "1250 W IEC" microwave oven has an effective RF heating output of 625 W. (The "wattage" of a microwave oven is measured in a strange way due to historical reasons.) A cell phone is about 2 watts. Thus a cell phone has a maximum transmit power of 312 times that of a microwave.

No idea why you're comparing maximum with minimum. That makes no sense.

Sedulous said:
That is not how RF works. Things usually efficiently absorb a narrow band of spectrum. 10% of the frequency (whatever that means) is not 90% the same. The frequency difference between cell phones and microwave ovens is significant enough to have different interactions with “stuff”. If what you said were true, cell phones could not work when it was raining or even mildly humid.
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Incorrect. In terms of safety, the human body resonates around 30-300 MHz (where the wavelength is comparable to the size of the body), thus safety limits are lower there. Specific material absorption lines are much higher, in the tens to hundreds of GHz. The FCC and ICNIRP safety limits are actually flat from 1.5 GHz (2 GHz ICNIRP) to 100 GHz (300 GHz ICNIRP).

eacc82_91013e8c4b6e411b926f7bfd3a6ccfcd_mv2.png

Sedulous said:
If what you said were true, cell phones could not work when it was raining or even mildly humid.
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Faulty logic. The real physics is that nothing absorbs much (relatively) in the cell phone bands. Therefore, a 10% difference in frequency doesn't matter with regards to absorption.
 
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FCC does this stuff, and independent labs test reckon they know better ? haha.

Its good to try and gear up the miss-information.

konqerror said:
Incorrect. A "1250 W IEC" microwave oven has an effective RF heating output of 625 W. (The "wattage" of a microwave oven is measured in a strange way due to historical reasons.) A cell phone is about 2 watts. Thus a cell phone has a maximum transmit power of 312 times that of a microwave.

No idea why you're comparing maximum with minimum. That makes no sense.



Incorrect. In terms of safety, the human body resonates around 30-300 MHz (where the wavelength is comparable to the size of the body), thus safety limits are lower there. Specific material absorption lines are much higher, in the tens to hundreds of GHz. The FCC and ICNIRP safety limits are actually flat from 1.5 GHz (2 GHz ICNIRP) to 100 GHz (300 GHz ICNIRP).

View attachment 883881



Faulty logic. The real physics is that nothing absorbs much (relatively) in the cell phone bands. Therefore, a 10% difference in frequency doesn't matter with regards to absorption.
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Is this why we prefer wireless earbuds ? I don't think convenience is ever the only reason,although its one of the reasons used
 
now i see it said:
perhaps the iPhones pass a specific test, but obviously they DO emit harmful radiation when kept close to the body. The iPhone hasn't been vindicated. It's still hazardous to hold it close regardless of what the FCC tests shows
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And there you go. Regardless of what the tests show, my assertion of harm is true.
 
konqerror said:
Incorrect. A "1250 W IEC" microwave oven has an effective RF heating output of 625 W. (The "wattage" of a microwave oven is measured in a strange way due to historical reasons.) A cell phone is about 2 watts. Thus a cell phone has a maximum transmit power of 312 times that of a microwave.

No idea why you're comparing maximum with minimum. That makes no sense.



Incorrect. In terms of safety, the human body resonates around 30-300 MHz (where the wavelength is comparable to the size of the body), thus safety limits are lower there. Specific material absorption lines are much higher, in the tens to hundreds of GHz. The FCC and ICNIRP safety limits are actually flat from 1.5 GHz (2 GHz ICNIRP) to 100 GHz (300 GHz ICNIRP).

View attachment 883881



Faulty logic. The real physics is that nothing absorbs much (relatively) in the cell phone bands. Therefore, a 10% difference in frequency doesn't matter with regards to absorption.
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A cell phone has (even according to the chart in the OP) 1.25W max. I was not comparing max to min. Those are the max and min tx power of a cell phone. Most of the time it runs at minimum and at the inititation of a call it hits max to power then bobs around. Safe to say, the power of a microwave oven is many hundreds to a billion times more powerful than a mobile phone.

Microwave ovens (and cell phones) do not operate in the MHz range. And as I said, different things specifically absorb at specific wavelengths. For example, a consumer microwave oven transmits at 2.45GHz. Things that are about the length of the hydrogen - oxygen bond in water efficiently absorbs that wavelength. Any smaller and it passes right through. That is why dry things cannot be heated in a microwave.

Not sure what is faulty about my logic. I think you did not understand the context of my reply. The original post said something like ”the frequency difference between microwave ovens and cell phones is 10%”. This already makes no sense... 10% of what? Different frequencies are different frequencies. Imagine trying to use a car radio to listen to music if different frequencies “bled” into other frequencies. Likewise, the microwave oven is tuned to be efficiently absorbed by water. If the frequency difference between microwave ovens and cell phones was not significant, rain and atmospheric moisture would block transmission.
 
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