Waveform Type

The shape of the electromagnetic pulse. The report classifies the shape of the FIELD measured at the coil, which is what the gauss probe sees. A manufacturer's specification usually names something different, the shape the device drives into the coil, and the two rarely match. The field follows the current in the coil, and current cannot change instantly through a coil, so the coil rounds the edges of whatever it is given. A square drive therefore reaches the probe as a ramp or as a ring and is measured as a sawtooth or a sine. Neither name is wrong; they describe the same pulse observed at two points in the circuit, so a difference between them is not counted against the device. See Sine Wave, Square Wave, Triangle Wave and Sawtooth Wave for the individual shapes. Classification criteria: Square has a flat top >40% of the pulse with edge fraction <30%, where flat top is the time held above 95% of amplitude as a share of the pulse (the 10% rise crossing to the 10% fall crossing). Triangle has flat top <15% with near-symmetric rise/fall ratio (0.6–1.7) and linear edges (R² >0.85). Sawtooth has asymmetric rise/fall, either flat top <15% with linear edges and ratio <0.3 or >3.0, or a rise/fall ratio <0.5 or >2.0 regardless of flat top or edge shape. This captures capacitor-discharge and impulse pulses with sharp spike and exponential recovery, where the broad peak briefly holds near max before decaying. Sine is the default for smooth curved edges not matching other criteria. Bipolar damped-sine bursts (loop coils driven by capacitor discharge producing a sine ringdown across multiple cycles) bypass these criteria entirely and are always assigned Sine. The carrier inside each burst is sinusoidal at the ring frequency by construction.