A past posting requested info about Korea EMC Requirements. Here's what I've learned, condensed for your reading pleasure, and interpretted for it's deeper meaning.
A foreign company must hire a Korean EMC lab to represent them for government certification, and pay the lab accordingly for the emission tests, report creation, and submission of the whole thing to the Korean authorities - along with the required fee. User manuals must be translated into Hangul/Korean. You might also have to provide full schematic diagrams with the test report. This must be repeated every year, and for each product. Every year, every product (plus fees!). Now stop a minute and consider the impact to an imaginary company that markets a relatively common but noticable number of products. Let's toss up the number 60 for products, and assume a work week in Korea is five days long, and that we're using a typical lab with a typical open area test site... Each emission test takes two days to run, plus time to write and assemble the test report, maybe three days total. (Labs tend to be notoriously slow at doing reports, though.) Three times 60 means that 180 EMI lab working days are required to completely run through all the products our imaginary company makes. That amounts to 36 weeks or 9 months of almost continuous testing at one lab. Imagine if this company markets 120 products. Now it needs 18 months of testing. Oh darn, they don't make years that long, do they? It's now time for the EMC lab to work two shifts, or hire a 2nd lab! We have nearly 200 products now and are still growing. (We can't obsolete things nearly as often as we'd like, people still need QBus cards for their good old PDP-11s.) Anyway, we'd need 30 months now for a single shift at the lab, two shifts needs 15 months - whoops, still three months left over! Gadfry! we'd need three shifts! So we've just determined that, for a company of our size, we would have to purchase a Korean EMC lab (to assure access and priority, how else could it be done?) and staff it to run three shifts. It would still take nearly an entire year to finish the first round of testing. Oh yeah, I was so worried about just finding TIME to run the tests, I forgot to consider the COST, or even if there are enough Korean labs to go around. (Ha ha ha ha!) Good luck to the rest of you that have the TIME. As for me, I'm going to sit back and watch the fireworks. Regards, Eric Lifsey
