[GrimJosef]

You can destroy solid-state gear easily if there's direct contact with an HV source, even a 'static' one, hence the anti-stat packaging, work-stations etc. But I think field-induced damage is rare unless the source is a thermonuclear weapon.

At work we took what care we could, but in the end we had to drive a 400-500kA (yup, kiloamps) 170ns long pulse of electrons into a metal tube (40cm dia, 220cm long) whose ends were sealed only by glass (strictly speaking fused silica) so were pretty much transparent to RF. The pulse risetime was 15ns or so. So dI/dt was roughly 3x10^13A/s. We got away with doing this a few times an hour for days on end and the kit operated this way for several years. We ran modern (1990's technology) high-vacuum gauges and vacuum photodiode power supplies within a few metres of this and the building's fire-alarm and internal phone system seemed perfectly happy too. Tek and HP scopes ran within 10m without coming to any harm.

Of course RF transients can disrupt some items' operation temporarily.

EDIT: I should say all this stopped before the turn of the millennium. So we were only concerned with 1G and 2G phones I think.

Cheers,

GJ