Hi Scott. You wrote: < It's sometimes all too easy to forget WHY we perform these tests. While we are trying to comply with written requirements in order to "pass", we are also trying to ensure product performance in the real world,> Time for my favourite hobby horse again...
Going back even further than your memory, back in fact to 1972, the Treaty of Rome in Europe. This was when the Euro Nations decided to get into a single trading bed and knock down barriers to trade within Europe. In Europe, we called it the Common Market. In the US it is often called 'Fortress Europe'. Whatever, as a result of this treaty, all Euro Nation States had to follow Directives, one of which was raised in 1989, the EMC directive, which sort to regularise EMC performance within Europe. The purpose of this Directive, I need not remind you, is to ensure that no Euro State, or any other state for that matter, couldn't steal a trading advantage by making their equipment cheaper by building to a lesser standard of EMC performance. I suppose it was levelling the playing field, such that everything had to meet a minimum standard. Since then the standard required is slowly getting stiffer, but whether this improves the lot of the Euro Proletariat or not, I have my doubts, but sure as hell the sales of filters, screening and EMC testing services has gone through the roof. I could ask, "Who are the CISPR committees, who told them what constituted a suitable EMC performance? Who voted them into power, who let them put the price of my TV up?" Who told the BS and DIN people to make my life more complicated and more expensive by constantly making the EMC requirements more difficult to meet? I don't remember voting for them... But as I earn my living supporting exactly that business, it would be churlish to do so, so I wont just now. If you read the Directive, you will note that terms like 'Removal of barriers to trade', and 'free movement of goods across borders' etc. are mentioned so often it gets boring. But not once does it say anything about making the world a less EMC active place, or anything about improvements to the environment or living quality by the reduction of interference. No, the EMC Directive is a financial/political package, the politicians who approved the Directive's publication wouldn't recognise an EMC if it fell on their foot. Our activities in trying to achieve Euro EMC standards is merely to meet the political aspirations of a European Economic Area, and so far that seems to at least stopped big wars in Europe for the last 50 years or so. Maybe that's the real reason for all this. Another self opinionated twopence worth from a tired, cynical, aging EMC hack. Chris Dupres Surrey, UK. p.s. Has anybody heard about the Bad Haircut Directive? --------- 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).
