The Four Basic Tenets of EMC Troubleshooting

The lull in the middle of the storm! As I write this I am sitting at home in the eye of hurricane Irene, the rain has stopped, the wind has stopped, and the sun is almost out. In the last 10 hours we have received over 6″ of rain. I know, however, that we have at least another 8 hours of torrential rain and hurricane force winds left before this thing is actually over.

At my presentation as part of the Consultant’s Workshop at the 2011 IEEE EMC Symposium in Long Beach, CA on Friday August 19, I talked about the four basis tenets of  EMC troubleshooting. If you understand these four basic principles, your EMC troubleshooting will be a lot easier and will go a lot faster. The four tenets are:

• Divide and Conquer
• Predominate Effect
• The “Kill it Dead” Strategy
• Fix Implementation

My next few blogs  will cover each of these basic principles individually.

Portable Spectrum Analyzer

My new PSA-T Series portable spectrum analyzer manufactured by Thurlby Thandar Instruments in the UK. It is available from Newark Electronics, as well as Saelig Electronics (www.saelig.com), the importer, in the US for under $2,000. There are two models, Model PSA1301T covers the frequency range of 150 kHz to 1.3 GHz and Model PSA2701T covers the frequency range of 1 MHz to 2.7 GHz. While it does not have all the bells and whistles of a large, heavy, expensive analyzer it has more than enough for doing precompliance EMC measurements. I highly recommend it.
Ken Wyatt has posted a nice review of the spectrum analyzer on his web site, you can see it at:    http://www.emcseminars.com/Technical_Articles/files/TTi_PSA2701T_Spectrum_Analyzer_Wyatt.pdf