RF Awareness Safety Course Online for Wireless Site Workers Introduced by LBA Group

INARTE-certified staff, college consultants create RF awareness training course that is affordable and convenient so workers can manage exposure.

Greenville, NC August 24, 2011 – Wireless technology integrator LBA Group, Inc. is offering an online OSHA-compliant RF awareness training course to help protect wireless industry workers from unhealthy levels of radio frequency. Developed in cooperation with college educators, the RF course is suitable for many other at-risk workers, including landscape personnel, roofers, sign installers, and building maintenance staff, to name a few.

The need for radio frequency awareness is a growing almost exponentially. Upwards of 250,000 cellular telephone antennas are bouncing signals around the U.S., according to TowerSource, which maintains the most accurate and extensive database of vertical communications infrastructure in the industry. Another 30,000 AM, FM and TV stations are emitting RF signals. And now, the proliferation of in-building DAS distributed antenna systems in increasingly sophisticated building environments is bringing concerns about RF exposure inside.

All this RF propagation is a fact of industrial life today and reflects the boom in wireless communications technology. Resulting RF threats that might seem abstract in the aggregate all become personal to any worker laboring near the antennas. Wireless industry technicians and tower climbers are the first focus of concern for LBA Group because such workers have the most immediate need for RF awareness training. The pervasive presence of wireless towers and dishes places many others at risk, too.

In response to this need for RF training, LBA called upon its INARTE-certified RF engineers and developed an online RF training course to earn a certificate. The course is a fully interactive learning experience that is economical and intuitively accessible. Workers can pursue it outside their working hours.

LBA is offering the course at low group rates so that employers can have entire work crews earn individual certificates that ensure the employees pursue their individual tasks with RF awareness. The course certificate is renewable annually so that workers can be compliant with OSHA practices. The course also features unique administrative reporting capabilities to help safety compliance managers track training of workers.

While knowledgeable technicians can brush up on their knowledge and quickly test out through the RF training course, less experienced workers who need to proceed more slowly can repeatedly log in and out of the course and complete it at their individual pace using any web-connected computer. Course content is introduced and recycled throughout the learning module so that when the comprehensive final RF training exam is taken, course mastery and retention are assured.

The RF training course was created through LBA’s Wireless University®, a compilation of expertise and industry knowledge that is regularly updated through white papers and other technical publications, plus interactions with technical academia. LBA Group has provided RF services to the wireless industry since 1963.

The RF awareness course developer is Chris Horne, PhD, P.E., LBA’s chief technical officer. He has years of RF and wireless industry experience. Course administrator Byron Johnson is the contact person for companies interested in signing up their employees for the RF awareness training.

LBA also offers RF safety planning and program services, including site audits, industrial hazard evaluations, zoning support and RF personal monitors.

Information on the RF safety training is at https://www.lbagroup.com/associates/rftraining.php.