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EEVblog #202 – EMC RF Anechoic Test Facility Tour
Posted on September 22nd, 2011 16 comments
Dave goes on a tour of EMC Technologies new $1.8M RF Anechoic Test chamber used for automatic and product testing for EMC emissions and susceptibility.
Also their other test chambers like the GTEM (Gigahertz Transverse Electromagnetic) test facility.
Thanks to Rob Weir (Yes, he’s a New Zealander :->)
www.emctech.com.au15 responses to “EEVblog #202 – EMC RF Anechoic Test Facility Tour”
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Holy crap ._.
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John Dowdell September 22nd, 2011 at 19:03
Awesome awesome video. And props to them for letting you poke around. So… $10 to $15 a tile eh? I wonder if they’d sell them in ones and twos
shipping would be the killer though.-
Actually, the ferrite tiles cost around US$6 each. At 10cm square, it works out to around $3600 per sq m.
The s called “cardboard” cones actually have a metal film inside and are not flammable. They cost around $400 per square metre but are not effective below 800 MHz. The older blue polyurethane cones are impregnated with carbon. They are effective but are heavy and flammable. Some labs have suffered fires when testing at 200 V/m.-
Thanks for the added details Chris, and for sharing your facility with us!
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Don’t knownwhere the 400 Mhz came from!! May be it wa slate in the night BUT it should read 30MHz to 1000 MHz
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Kart (not that Karl, the other Karl) September 23rd, 2011 at 04:23
Did I hear that right? Whenever you went into a chamber your cell phone interfered with he camera audio? It would make sense, the cell phone ramping up its power, because it figures the power form the cell phone tower got weak.
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adam lumpkins September 23rd, 2011 at 10:23
Dave I love it when you guys walked into the chamber the echo was gone!!!!! What were the cones made of?
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That’s a nice facility. It would have been great to see a typical unit under test as a demo.
Two suggestions for improvement: 1; Put a radio microphone on your guest so we can hear him and 2; Edit for length.
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The Ferrari is definietly not EMC’s company car. Note that it was in the visitors spot. Most successful companies use our services, another reason why they are successful!!
Chris Zombolas-MD. -
nice chamber, 10m class ?, non-flammables absorbers…
it doesn’t seem to have a turntable for vehicles.
I used a 30m class chamber in Japan, with a turntable capable of turning a truck, that was really impressive !
Also, i saw photos from an EMC chamber which burned down including half of the EMC company after a light fall down on flammable absorbers, crazy. the old flammable absorbers burn so fast, it nearly explodes !
The FCC standard uses this crazy metal ground plane, which makes little other sense than to cost less money than absorbers ! European standards specify free space but allow FCC style tests (with a conversion ratio)
when you test antennas, you need a fully anechoic chamber, which is more difficult to find…
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other remark : the GTEM is just a square coax which gets bigger while keeping the same impedance (50 ohm). So it’s a coax cable you can walk inside !!
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Cool video! I used to work at a company that purchased a similar system for EMC RF compliance testing in-house. I was supposed to be the one in charge of setting it up but then I left. Oops!
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[...] The question Noisy data line clears on wiring up multiple output hooks of uC to Logic Analyzer got me to convinced that the easiest method to find out if outdoors interference is leading to trouble for a circuit would be to test drive it inside a faraday cage. Large companies may even visit the cost of testing in Anechoic test chambers. [...]
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Andrew Vuong September 22nd, 2011 at 11:25