[quote]ORIGINAL: cstevec

<snip> As near as I can tell, the rules are written around the very meter I just purchased from Radio shack. We have a Calibration facility where I work so I will take this handy-dandy $49.00 meter by there tomorrow and get it checked out. For what I paid, it seems to be a reasonably good quality piece of gear. I would be willing to bet it is as accurate as any of those infra-red digital temp guages I see advertised on here, certainly close enough for our efforts.

/quote]

Right on. cstevec -

Noise annoyance is entirely subjective, and not surprisingly there is a considerable variance in noise level that annoys different people. Most people can't discern a difference of less than about 2 dB in sound level and that is about the tolerance of the Rat Shack meter, which is probably considerably better than what makes any difference to people whose activities may be disrupted by noise. It's a good value, the only real shortcoming being that it is only capable of instantaneous measurements. Noise annoyance is cumulative, and objective measurements that attempt to correlate to subjective annoyance need to take this into consideration. Many well-formulated community ordinances specify limits on sound emissions in terms of an integral over some time period (Leq), most often one hour. To get accurate measures in such cases, an integrating sound level meter is needed. That's an expensive item, but can readily be obtained for the short time it is needed in the instrument rental marketplace. Our club does a sound survey every few years with an integrating meter at points on the field perimeter, and relies on the RS meter and simple math for model qualification in the interim periods.

Abel