Thank you, Ed,
We appreciate your effort for initiating, organizing, conducting,
presenting and summarizing this funny survey. We should also give credit to
your employer, Cubic, and your supervisor for their excellent vision to
allow you to spend lot of time on the professional service of worldwide
EMC/Safety community.
Best Regards,
Barry Ma
-------------
Original Text
From: <ed.pr...@cubic.com>, on 11/19/98 4:01 PM:
EMC_PSTC Listmembers:
A couple of weeks ago, I read a post which described a rural OATS that
sounded like such a nice place to work. That got me to thinking about all
the exotic (don't go past the minefield sign) and dumb (hanging out over a
cliff to probe a microwave beampath) or even dangerous (hey you, izzat
stuff worth uh lotta cash) places where I have erected an antenna. And that
led to my querying our group about their test sites. So, without further
blather, here's the honor list (some names deleted to protect the
embarrassed).
1.) Steve Kuiper <aegisl...@email.msn.com>
Our laboratory facility is located deep within a canyon at the base of a
4000 foot mountain in Southern California near a creek bed. The floor noise
is excellent and the ambients are low. Line noise is non-existent. Our
customers see many advantages.
2.) Jack Cook <jc...@cax.es.xerox.com >
Xerox has an OATS in "Rattlesnake Canyon" (a small side-canyon of Bautista
Canyon), also in Southern California. Rattlers have been found on or under
stair steps, next to parked cars and in other neat spots. Needless to say,
the personnel don't walk or stick their hands where they can't look first.
3.) Dan Mitchell <dmitch...@eoscorp.com>
On a loading dock at the rear of our factory.
4.) Derek <lfresea...@aol.com>
My wild life is just the plain old stuff:
9 Deer
Squirrels galore
A single ground hog
2 chipmunk families
A Raccoon
At least one owl,
And brown bats.... not many mossies this year!
The Deer often watch me at night now, kind of strange when you see their
eyes in the trees looking at you.
5.) Deborah Olson <debbie.ol...@compaq.com>
I've got a candidate for a test site in the stupidest location.
When I worked for a small company in S. Florida we used a test house for
FCC
Part 15 that was located in a commercial warehouse/office complex adjacent
to the Tamiami airport. Behind the complex was the transmitting tower for
one of the local TV stations. Also on (or adjacent to) the airport
property
was a field that was a popular spot for people to fly their remote
controlled airplanes. The "test room", if you can call it that, was like
an
oversized garage bay constructed of a concrete slab, concrete block walls
and and metal roof. They did have a piece of copper screening down on the
floor underneath the turntable and they also tried to install cones on the
walls but they only had enough cones to do part of one wall. When you
looked at a baseline scan the noise was so bad that virtually anything
could
pass. In fact my previous employer got a product approved there that wound
up being tested at another lab and was found to be over 20dB above the
Class
A limit. The site was so noisy that you had all sorts of ambient frequency
spikes that could (and did) "hide" a failing frequency emitted by the
equipment under test.
I asked the technician one time how in the world the FCC approved their
site
and he replied that the site wasn't approved for formal scans---just
pre-testing. The "formally approved" site was an OATS in the owner's back
yard who lived in a rural area. But it was too far away for customers to
go
to so they just did everything from the warehouse location. The owner was
supposedly had friends ... so he wasn't worried.
I suspect that they're no longer in business.
6.) Randall Flinders <randall.flind...@emulex.com>
We have an open area test site in our Competitor's Parking Lot. Located in
Downtown
Costa Mesa, I sometimes wonder if I am getting cancer from all of the
ambient signals!
7.) Larry Stillings <stillin...@aol.com>
President, Compliance Worldwide, Inc.
We have a 3 / 10 meter OATS off the garage of my house in Central NH.
Product and personnel enclosed, 3 & 10 meter antennas outside. Very low
ambient. Check it out at http://www.cw-inc.com
8.) Eric Henning <eric.henn...@bailey.com>
"...is laboring away in the underground hallway where I do pre-scans..."
9.) Terry J. Meck <tjm...@accusort.com>
I was able to conjole a 6m x 6m room next to a shipping dock in the back of
one of our buildings. Facing a woods. I was also able to talk them into
a galvanized sheet metal ground plane. This same building had, in the shed
outback a bird littered 10' x 10' screen room we stumbled on when we took
possession. It helps a little for small products and creating a suspect
list.
It is still very full of time consuming ambient signals. But it could be
worse. I used my back yard a few times when I first got into this.
Saturday AM before 9 was a good time. That seems a long time ago.
10.) Gary McInturff <gmcintu...@packetengines.com>
The actual OATS test arena was non-descript. It was open on flat
ground outside of Spokane WA. Ground cloth was down and the perimeter was
bonded to copper ground rods. The Test Equipment hut from which the test
was performed was a choice of convenience. There happened to be a tin
building sitting over an abandoned well head. The building was about 6 X 6
with a cement floor. The walls and ceiling were covered with corrugated tin
attached to open 2 X 4's. The roof support 2 X 4's rested on top of the
walls and atop that was the roof tin. Between them was the "air
conditioning
system" the gap between walls and tin roof. A single 100 Watt light bulb
that illuminated the inside doubled as the heat source. Spring and fall
weren't too bad but summer and winter in Spokane can get extremes of a week
over 100 and a week below zero. The rest of the year is somewhere between
80 and 30.
In the winter the equipment, including the $80,000 analyzer, was
transported to the test hut via a tractor that normally was used to remove
snow from the facilities. When we got to the hut before we could set the
analyzer up we had to knock the snow off of the setup table. By the end of
the day the snow that was knocked onto the floor had yet to begin to melt!
In order to walk to the restroom it was a three block walk
through sometimes knee-deep snow. (Yellow snow, I might add, is visible for
a long way!) Winter was eventually survived and spring enjoyed. Then summer
hit. We became painfully aware why some countries put POW's into tin sheds
for punishment! Shorts, no tee shirt and sweat bands were an absolute must.
Occasionally, I had meetings which I had to attend. I was fairly visible
amongst the tie wearing set!
During much of the year many of our engineers flew radio
controlled airplanes in the area. They like to buzz the test hut and on one
occasion committed a plane to a suicide run into the hut. Scaring the
(*)#($*)#(*$ out of me. What they failed to recognize was that I could
identify which frequency they were flying on and I had both an antenna and
a frequency generator. Planes began falling out of the sky!
I thought I had made my point and won the war - but they were
patient! Come the very next winter I was in the igloo when they crept up
around the hut, locked the door from the outside and began flinging snow
into the shed through the gaps between walls and ceiling. I literally had
over a foot of snow all around me when they got done. In order to remain
anonymous they didn't even unlock the door. The called security and sent
them.
11.) Douglas McKean <dmck...@corp.auspex.com>
The most er ... challanging site where I had products tested was at an
OATS run by Xxxxxx when they were just on the other side of the fence
(literally) from Manchester Airport in Manchester New Hampshire. I think
they've moved.
12.) Douglas McKean <dmck...@corp.auspex.com>
Another one was in New Hartford CT run by a single gentleman. It was in
his barn. If you left your product out on the table over night, you had to
scrape a ton of bat shit off it the next morning ...
13.) ed.pr...@cubic.com, in a previous life at an unacknowledged facility
"Here boy, take this gas-mask kit and keep it with you night and day. Put
it on right quick if you hear the warning siren!" says the Sargent.
"But we'll be out on the desert floor, miles from the base. What if we
can't hear the siren?" says I.
"Well, you got a big group of people with you. Just stay on the downwind
edge of the group. You put your mask on when the other people start to
drop." instructs the Sargent.
"Now this here's your Atropine antidote self-injector. If you notice your
vision starting to narrow down to just a little spot, then slap this end
down right smart on your thigh." he continues.
"Uh Sargent, what if we only get a little exposure, but the injector
delivers a full shot of antidote. What happens if we get too much
antidote?" I wonder.
"Shaddup!" he suggests, very convincingly.
14.) ed.pr...@cubic.com, in a previous life at a non-existant facility
"I don't care if you ARE a civilian contractor, I'm getting a blood sample
from you NOW and when we let you off the base." said the very intimidating
civilian whatever.
"They been making and testing nerve gas here for 45 years, but they still
spray bug-killer each night?"
15.) ed.pr...@cubic.com, in a previous life at an unacknowledged facility
"It costs 8 six-packs for me to let you drive that M-113 (turbine powered,
tracked, armored personel carrier; thank you, America!)."
16.) ed.pr...@cubic.com, in a previous life at an unacknowledged facility
"I wonder where all the rattlesnakes go during the heat of the day."
17.) ed.pr...@cubic.com
At China Lake, in the high Mojave Desert, the burros come out at night and
chew the vehicle tires, power cables and coax cables.
18.) Joe Martin <marti...@pebio.com>
I went to this particular site ONE time. It was right next to San
Fransisco
International Airport. Ambients. What's an ambient?? "Can you please turn
your instrument off and on again." (100th time).
19.) Scott Douglas <s_doug...@ecrm.com>
I have a room in the corner of our building. No windows, but my own heat
and A/C. Two walls are lined with foil faced foam insulation, all seams are
copper taped together. I have a 5' x 10' sheet of galvanized steel floating
on the center of the floor for a "ground plane". The software lab is to my
right and the electrical lab to my backside, thus the foil faced insulation
"shielding". The room was previously used as a computer room, raised floor
and all. It held the PDP-8 which finally went away in 1995.
20.) chris_al...@3com.com
I have used in the past a site which is owned by Celectica in the UK. The
30m site is located in a cavern in a rock salt mine 600ft underground.
21.) David Brumbaugh <david.brumba...@pss.boeing.com>
I work for a defense/government contractor, and we don't use an OATS
facility here at my location, though we've been known to in the distant
past. We mostly test indoors, but when I go to lunch or look out the window,
on most days I can see Mt. Rainier standing majestically in the background
as I peer south down the Kent (WA) valley. On a really nice day, it's a
view that's hard to beat.
22.) Hans Melberg <hmellb...@aol.com>
This is not an existing chamber but my dream someday!
I have for years tried to convince someone to give me money to construct,
in my opinion, the best (semi)-anechoic chamber. I call it the "Picasso
room" because no two walls are parallel. This way, the absorbers which are
at the hairy edge of non-functionality are helped along by removing
symetric reflections. I believe that I can improve chamber performance
(absorber performance really) by at least 6 to 10 dB. The room, would be
quite easy to construct as the primary backbone would indeed be a perfect
parallelopiped from where to anchor the walls and ceilings. The floor would
of course be level.
There is more.
The room would would utilize multiple antennas and the turntable would turn
slowly (1/2rpm) and indefenitely in one direction. A complete scan could be
accomplished in less than 2 hours from 30MHz to 10GHz. Output plots would
would pick each EUT frequency x-dB above noise floor or y-dB below a limit
and plot them for azimuth vs field strength vs elevation.
Dreams.
Well, that's the whole bunch. First, I'll disqualify my entries, cause if I
won anything, I would have to deny all knowledge of everything. So here
goes:
Top award goes to #22, Hans. What can I say; he's a dreamer of automated
data reduction and non-linear geometry.
Next mention goes to #1, Steve. I wonder how the fishin' is in that creek?
An honorable mention goes to #4, Derek, for his attention to small animals.
I didn't think anyone would beat #8, Eric, in his underground hallway, but
#20, Chris, beat him by some 600 feet (err, 200 meters).
Special mention to #21, Dave; he's got a window!
And finally, congratulations to #18, Joe, for locating an OATS without an
ambient.
Thanks to all for sharing your stories.
Ed
--------------------------
Ed Price
ed.pr...@cubic.com
Electromagnetic Compatibility Lab
Cubic Defense Systems
San Diego, CA. USA
619-505-2780
List-Post: emc-pstc@listserv.ieee.org
Date: 11/18/1998
Time: 12:16:03
--------------------------
---------
This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list.
To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.org
with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the
quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com,
j...@gwmail.monarch.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or
roger.volgst...@compaq.com (the list administrators).
---------
This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list.
To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.org
with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the
quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com,
j...@gwmail.monarch.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or
roger.volgst...@compaq.com (the list administrators).
