Radial force for FEM objects?

[bentway23]

So I'm sure this is a stupid, way-newbie question:

I am working with various FEM elements. What I need is a radially-orienting force to "push" the objects. However, I want it to pulse, like a fan being turned on and off. (I couldn't get the fan force's shape to behave in such a way to make it completely spherically radial.)

From my Googling, it looks like magnet force is the way to work, but it seems impossible to control. I've been scaling a metaball using a sine-wave based CHOPnet, but the metaball itself pulsing on a SOP level doesn't seem to impact the force's scale in a not-unruly way, and the force scale can (seemingly) only be keyed in steps (which is why I went for scaling a meatball). This step keyframing is a problem because I want the force to oscillate to negative values, too, for push and pull. There doesn't seem to be a way to scale it in general within a certain area--i.e. to have a super-strong force the field as a whole has to be enlarged, so one-half of a FEM object can't get pulled on very strongly while the "outside" half is unaffected.

I'm used to working with Maya, so really all I want is a nice, tidy Radial field, which can suck and blow (radially) as I tell it.

Any help is profoundly appreciated.

Edited November 2, 2018 by bentway23