Doug:
I took the liberty of severely editing you response, but I think the essence of your story is: “someone who goes to labs with no knowledge of how these tests are run are at a real disadvantage” I thought that the whole purpose of accreditation was to provide protection to the customer who is not an EMC expert and who cannot personally evaluate the quality of the EMC test services. Some 3rd party would police the test labs, and, to the extent that you trusted this 3rd party, you could trust the quality of accredited services. Sure, humans make mistakes, but the frequency of these mistakes should be statistically down in the same range as say, the number of times your test lab had a fire in the past year. However, since you know that it is necessary for a test services customer to be well-informed, then that’s evidence that the accreditation system is failing to deliver on its promise of a safe test environment. Perhaps accreditation can’t deliver what we expect, or perhaps we aren’t applying accreditation correctly. We have had about 35 years of EMC lab accreditation experience, and yet we still can’t, in good conscience, send an innocent customer through the process. Your solution is to make your clients smarter (which I don’t argue with at all), but what does that say of the efficacy and value of accreditation? Ed Price WB6WSN Chula Vista, CA USA From: Douglas Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 10:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PSES] Brick power supplies and test errors (two topics) Hi Ed and the Group, Ed said: "Did you create a write-up on what those errors specifically were, and how it happened that you noticed them in time to control them?" I have not specifically written them up although I do tell them as war stories during my presentations. The biggies I remember were antenna placement, wrong antenna factors, and injecting more current in the conducted immunity test than was called for Other biggies are ESD test setups non-compliant (the lab test area) and the EFT test run with the clamp backwards. But someone who goes to labs with no knowledge of how these tests are run are at a real disadvantage. Recently I have rolled up a lot of this information in to a short web presentation I give to my clients so they can avoid these problems. Doug University of Oxford Tutor Department for Continuing Education Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom -------------------------------------------------------------- ___ _ Doug Smith \ / ) P.O. Box 60941 ========= Boulder City, NV 89006-0941 _ / \ / \ _ TEL/FAX: 702-570-6108/570-6013 / /\ \ ] / /\ \ Mobile: 408-858-4528 | q-----( ) | o | Email: [email protected] \ _ / ] \ _ / Web: http://www.dsmith.org - ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. To post a message to the list, send your e-mail to <[email protected]> All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: http://www.ieee-pses.org/emc-pstc.html Attachments are not permitted but the IEEE PSES Online Communities site at http://product-compliance.oc.ieee.org/ can be used for graphics (in well-used formats), large files, etc. Website: http://www.ieee-pses.org/ Instructions: http://www.ieee-pses.org/list.html (including how to unsubscribe) List rules: http://www.ieee-pses.org/listrules.html For help, send mail to the list administrators: Scott Douglas <[email protected]> Mike Cantwell <[email protected]> For policy questions, send mail to: Jim Bacher: <[email protected]> David Heald: <[email protected]>
