Safety distances underneath vertically polarized base station antennas

Assessing the safety distances to base station antennas needs to be done in a quick but safe manner. The commonly performed far-field calculation leads typically to an overestimation of the safety distance in the main beam direction. However, for the vertical safety distance the straight forward application of the far-field formula might lead to an underestimation of the field strengths. Based on a computational investigation of half-wavelength dipoles, which are built in most base station antennas a new formula is presented that allows a safe assessment of the safety distance directly underneath the base station antenna.