The overall goal is to develop traceable measurement and characterization methods for the European telecommunication industry. The goal is also to support a sustainable approach guaranteeing the highest quality of measurement standards in line with the CEI 62209-3 standard, currently being developed by IEC TC 106: “Methods for the assessment of electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic fields associated with exposure to humans.”
The CEC (European Consumer Centre) will focus on the metrology research required to support the standardization of SAR measurement, using vector probes.
SAR calibration methods with individual probes are well established in IEC 62209-1 and 2 standards and provide a range of calibration uncertainty of around 10% at k = 2. However, these methods cannot be applied to sensor networks, mainly because of the latter’s physical size and they do not calibrate the phase measurement for the vector probe, which is key to the accuracy of reconstruction on the ground. The fact is that the entire range of sensors is performing well, which cannot be ascertained on the basis of individual sensors. This is why the IEC is developing a new IEC62209-3 standard to formalize SAR measurements with vector probes. This has however highlighted the challenges posed by establishing traceability and analyzing uncertainty for vector-based measurement systems. As a result, we currently rely on the validation of SAR measurement thanks to reference sources. Although this suits a small range of existing devices with reference sources, no new devices are being developed (with no new reference sources either).