Tag Archives: EMC troubleshooting

New Book Published!

Hi Everyone,

I recently published the first book in a three-volume series on EMC troubleshooting and pre-compliance testing techniques that may be performed right on the workbench at your own facility.

Creating Your Own EMC Troubleshooting Kit – Essential Tools for EMC Troubleshooting

Why Read This Book? – With all the many pressures you have as a product designer, does electromagnetic compliance (EMC) always seems like a stumbling block to delaying product sales? Is your product exhibiting one of the top three failures; radiated emissions, electrostatic discharge or radiated immunity? Are you continually cycling between design/fixing – running to the compliance test lab – failing again – and back to applying more fixes? Wondering how to attack these issues earlier in the design cycle? Would you like to learn how to characterize and troubleshoot simple design issues right on your workbench? Then this is the book for you! 

The purpose of this guide is to help you to duplicate and customize your own EMC troubleshooting kit. This should prove useful whether you are an “internal EMC consultant” in a larger corporation, an engineer who “wears many hats” and occasionally is forced to deal with EMC compliance or if you’re consulting in the field of EMC for other companies. Most of the content is a collection of past blog articles from EDN.com and Interference Technology Magazine. My hope is that the information within this guide will help you become more efficient and offer a more professional appearance to your managers or clients, as the case may be. Future volumes in the series will include simple ways of using these tools to perform your own in-house emissions and immunity troubleshooting and pre-compliance testing.

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CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 – CREATING YOUR OWN EMC TROUBLESHOOTING KIT
CHAPTER 2 – SPECTRUM ANALYZERS
CHAPTER 3 – NEAR FIELD PROBES
CHAPTER 4 – CURRENT PROBES
CHAPTER 5 – ANTENNAS
CHAPTER 6 – BROADBAND PREAMPLIFIERS
CHAPTER 7 – CONDUCTED EMISSIONS
CHAPTER 8 – ELECTROSTATIC DISCHARGE (ESD)
CHAPTER 9 – RADIATED IMMUNITY
CHAPTER 10 – OSCILLOSCOPES
CHAPTER 11 – HARMONIC COMB GENERATORS
CHAPTER 12 – MISCELLANEOUS COMPONENTS AND EQUIPMENT
CHAPTER 13 – SUMMARY AND REFERENCES

180 pages

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2013 in review

The WordPress.com prepared a 2013 annual report for my EMC blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Measuring Resonance in Cables

Cables or other metal (antenna-like) structures often couple to sources of common-mode currents and end up radiating, causing product failures during compliance testing. During the troubleshooting process, it would be helpful to determine the resonance of these cables or structures to confirm they are the source of certain harmonic signals.

We could certainly measure the length of the cables or metal structures, but often, they are connected to other conductive assemblies, such as circuit boards or brackets. Because of these system inter-relationships, it’s not always easy to predict the resonances within a system, and so there’s always a little uncertainty as to where to start the troubleshooting process. These simple techniques may help quickly identify potential resonances within your system or product.

Continue reading…

Fig1 - Setup