Minutes to be posted soon.

Program Summary: 

Measurements made to show compliance to the EMC regulatory limits for radiated emissions require the use of antennas. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between the ways the antennas are designed, used and calibrated. This is further confused by the international requirements that must be met when both qualifying an EMC test site and the theoretical models which still have their own inaccuracies. Most of the difficulties arise from the size of the antennas, which at lower frequencies are comparable to the test geometry dimensions. When making any measurement it is an essential goal that the measurement device does not alter the parameter being measured. This is very difficult to achieve during EMC testing and so there is an additional source of uncertainty hat needs to be evaluated and considered.

This presentation explores the history of measurement techniques, looks at the magnitude of the errors introduced, and shows how through the use of computational techniques this problem is slowly being addressed. To help explain the issues, the behaviors of a number of different antennas are explored in the EMC test environment.

Our Speaker:  Colin Brench has been working for Hewlett-Packard (via Digital Equipment Corp., and Compaq), for 20 years, where he is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff. He has responsibility for EMC product design, and the development of EMC modeling capabilities in the High Performance Server Laboratory.