John Ferrell wrote in
:

I get a little worried about more than a couple of watts around areas
with people.

Ah, this must be in the vein of "they have been unable to prove EMR
safe".

There are clear guidelines / rules on maximum permitted exposure to EMR
that should allow design and operation of a station with confidence that
it most unlikely to be an EMR hazard to one's self, family or the general
public. Understanding and applying this is just another facet of the
hobby today, though I concede it is beyond our new 6 hour hams (though
that is part of the reason for their low power limit, should they observe
it).

One of my current projects is a self contained field strength meter for
field measurement near a transmitting antenna. It consists of a small
single turn untuned square loop, terminated in a known load, a detector
and an inexpensive battery power LCD panel meter, all self contained
mounted on a non-conductive stick with no trailing wires. It is fairly
straight forward to produce an Antenna Factor / Freq chart using NEC, and
a detector calibration (Vout/Pin). Trials have been encouraging with good
correlation with expected field strength.

On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that UV radiation is a health
hazard, and there is no "safe" exposure level (ie a threshold below which
no changes will take place in living cells). If one took a balanced
approach, before becoming too concerned about EMR MPE, one would protect
one's self from ANY sunshine, direct or indirect.

If it appears that ham's brains have been addled by RF, they were
probably that way before exposure to EMR, it might just be a factor for
selection of hams. (You don't have to be mad to be a ham, but it helps!)

Owen