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Raising Standards and Changing the Rules on Cell Phone Radiation

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Five years have gone by in which the FCC has completely ignored petitions for rule changes that would force cell phone case manufacturers to attain FCC radiation safety compliance when their products interfere with a phone’s antenna or RF radiation exposure levels.

This lack of regulation is resulting in far too much mystery about the actual levels of radiation that children are being exposed to when cell phone accessories are being used, and what serious risk this excessive exposure will have on them.

RF Safe aims to lead the way towards companies self-enforcing a commitment to consumer safety without waiting for government regulation to enforce safety compliance, when the need has such an obvious scientific understanding.

For over twenty years, our primary goal here at RF Safe has been to provide you the highest quality informational safety data and products in order to offer the very highest level of consumer protection from potential health effects attributed to excessive microwave radiation.

Our number one priority has always been the forward progress of safer wireless technology to ensure the well-being of every person who uses a cell phone.

Cell phone users must beware! Many of the companies who’ve followed in RF Safe’s footsteps over the last two decades seem to have pure profit as their prime motivating factor.

At RF Safe, our motivation is to follow through with a mission and vision that will provide consumers with the highest quality, most effective methods of wireless safety in the world by putting people first!

To further show RF Safe’s commitment to keeping cell phone users safe worldwide, we are excited to announce that we are about to embark on a game-changing SAR testing campaign that we hope will completely alter SAR test requirements for phone accessories which will pave the way to insure that all phone cases sold are engineered never to increase phone radiation exposure.

Simplifying how consumers can use wireless technology safely should be a goal for every company involved in the wireless industry!

RF Safe strongly advises the FCC to require that any phone accessories which can affect SAR levels must be put through the same SAR regulatory process as cell phones.

In 2015, based on an analysis of data submitted to the Federal Communications Commission which showed that some cases on the market were so poorly engineered that they actually intensified the radiation that strikes a user’s head and body, the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, which is a well-respected, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, urged the FCC to revise their outdated testing guidelines to take into account the effect that cell phone cases have on the amount of radiation exposure a person receives when using a smartphone with a phone case, regardless if the case manufacture claims a reduction of radiation exposure or not.


The four recommendations EWG provided were:

1) Require all case manufacturers to test their cases with all compatible phones to ensure that the phones remain in compliance with federal standards.

2) Require case manufacturers to test their products with a subset of compatible phones to ensure that most phones meet the FCC standards.

3) Require manufacturers that make both phones and cases to show that their phones meet FCC standards when used with their cases.

4) Test a representative sample of popular phones in popular cases to determine how much a case typically increases radiation absorption and decrease its SAR limit by at least this amount in the updated standards.


These recommendations were made five years ago, but the FCC has still not revised their testing guidelines to account for aftermarket cell phone accessories, which indicates an extreme air of indifference on their part when it comes to actually protecting the health of the hundreds of millions of Americans who use cell phones with cases and other accessories that may interfere with the phone reception, thus causing an increase in radiation as well as potentially dangerous health risks.

RF Safe believes deeply in making today’s wireless technology as safe as possible for consumers by helping them to avoid excessive exposure to RF radiation. We have decided to be the first company in the world to implement these FCC regulatory suggestions submitted by the EWG.

The first run of testing will include ten different SAR measurements using an iPhone 11 Pro Max. The most popular anti-radiation cases will be put to the test along with standard cases as well, such as those found where the phone was purchased.

RF Safe’s SAR testing will replicate the test position, frequency band, and channel that was performed for the Chicago Tribune and FeganScott law group reports to simulate a more realistic distance related to real-world usage and exposure levels.

Our goal is to test several phones and cases each month at the minimum distance performed in both the above-mentioned case study reports.

In other words, we seek to discover the most realistic SAR values with and without shielded cases, embedded antenna cases and popular everyday cases manufactured from around the world at the minimum distance of two millimeters which will account for the thickness of the front flip cover on those style cases. A lot of good data should come from this effort!

One important note! RF Safe does NOT believe, nor has RF Safe EVER endorsed, that SAR test values currently considered safe by the FCC and FDA truly represent biologically safe levels of exposure.

However, RF Safe does believe SAR testing can serve a purpose evaluating the effect that phone accessories have on a phone’s out-put power regulation, pattern of radiation emitted and human absorption of microwave radiation due to aftermarket phone accessory usage.

I’ll be making a video on the results and which cases were tested very soon. You can get updates on which phones and cases are next to be tested at www.rfsafe.com