  Radiofrequency fields are usually measured in order to be compared with
electromagnetic exposure limits defined by international standardization
organizations with the aim of preserving the human health. However, in the case
of WiFi technology, accurate measurement of the radiation coming from user
terminals and access points is a great challenge due to the nature of these
emissions, which are noncontinuous signals transmitted in the form of pulses of
short duration. Most of the methodologies defined up to now for determining
WiFi exposure levels use or take as reference exposimeters, broadband probes,
and spectrum analyzers without taking into account that WiFi signals are not
continuously transmitted. This leads to an overestimation of the radiation
level that cannot be considered negligible when data of the actual exposure are
needed. To avoid this, other procedures apply empirical weighting factors that
account for the actual duration of burst transmissions. However, this implies
the implementation of additional measurements for calculating the weighting
factors, and thus, increases the complexity of the work. According to this, it
was still necessary to define the frequency domain measurement setup that is
optimal for obtaining realistic WiFi signal values, without requiring the
performance of additional recordings. Thus, the definition of an appropriate
methodology to achieve this goal was established as the main objective of this
paper. The set of tasks carried out to identify such a configuration, as well
as the limitations obtained for other measurement settings, are deeply
explained in this paper.
