I help Companies quickly resolve EMC Compliance (and other compliance issues) issues for Electronic Products.
If you have an electronic product that has failed EMC tests (aka FCC / RF Emissions) at a EMC lab, you are not alone (see below). The fastest way to get a product to pass the required tests, is to hire an EMC consultant. There are many EMC Consultants available, including myself. If you opt to solve it on your own you might be looking at a 6 month or more delay in market release. If you hire one of the EMC Consultants, you are likely to get the product to market in about 3 months. In recent years I have resolved most EMC issues in hours (time to implement the changes I recommend, takes more time). I likely can resolve your compliance issues without traveling to you location and without your sending me a product to diagnose. All I need is to see your documentation and photo’s to review. That will save you money and speed up your time to market with your new product..
If you still want to try to resolve the EMC failure yourself, check out my page: “Product EMC Failure – What Now?”
The Ugly Story
Only 10% of all electronic products pass with no modifications on their first trip to EMC lab and/or the product safety testing labs. Another 50% pass with minor changes on the first visit to the labs. The rest need significant changes, which causes delays in releasing the product. This means a lot of products do not get to the market as fast as they should. And you are not alone in having a failure.
How I ran into the failure rate, was an experience on my first trip to a lab for Susceptibility testing of three products for Europe. Part way through susceptibility testing of the first product, the technician stopped the testing. He then started checking his test equipment for a malfunction and he seemed distressed. I asked what the issue was and he said that there had to be an equipment failure. When I asked why, he said all products they had tested in the past had failed by that point in the testing, so there had to be a issue with the test equipment. He didn’t find any test equipment failures so he continued the testing. All three products with me on that trip, passed with no changes.
After a few years I realized that the bulk of the products I was responsible for passed on the first trip to the EMC and Safety labs, where most other companies products failed on the first trip (some were fixed on the spot and then passed). After a lot of asking around I found out the failure on the first trip to the labs was worse than I expected.
Some of he products I was involved with, passed Class B with no changes and more than 10 dB of margin to Class B, on the first trip to the lab. On a couple products the labs reported that they could find any signals out of the product and they reported the noise floor of the spectrum analyzer instead. A number of the products were in plastic unshielded enclosures and only need to be Class A.
After thinking about why I was being successful, I realized that I did not really look at things the same way as others did along with the company had procedures that were different from most other companies..
If you would like to get your future products to market quicker with no modifications, I can do a presentation for your company on how to do so (for a fee of course). Just drop me an email and I will provide a quote.
My focus is on EMC Consulting, however I can help with safety and the other electronic product compliance issues, such as EMI, RFI, RF Emissions, ESD and product safety.