If you try to sell a commercial electronic widget in the EU or for that matter if you try to sell an industrial electronic widget in the EU, you must meet mandated susceptibility standards. Why? Because the poor slobs who make electronic gizmos must restrict their electrical interference so that a properly designed widget will work in the presence of a gizmo. Since a shortwave receiver (widget) under the right conditions can hear a one-transistor 10 milliwatt transmitter (gizmo) halfway around the world in either direction, it is obvious that a tender widget can be upset by even a quiet gizmo. Or to put it another way, widgets need to be hardened or there can be no gizmos.

Lest you should think that only the EU is requiring susceptibility standards, consider Canada, Japan, China, Australia and a few others who have immunity standards. Guess only the USA and Ghana don’t have immunity standards and don’t use the metric system. Wait a minute, Ghana may have joined Guinea-Bissau and the rest of the world and it’s just us. Why, you say, is the USA without a set of requirements that the rest of the world and any reasonable engineer can see are necessary? Because this country is run by Senator Blutarskey and his drunken buddies. The dim bulb politicians who run this country can’t get past the companies who contribute to their campaigns to be reelected to their cushy jobs. And all the time you thought they represented us.

What happens is that the lawyers in the FCC (I think the last engineer retired in 1980) see that it would be best if we had susceptibility standards, but every time they bring it up General Bullmoose calls Blutarskey who calls a lawyer in the FCC and says, “Say, do you guys want to keep your meager appropriation or what?” So, no susceptibility standard. Even when Bullmoose has to fit his widget with all sorts of suppression devices to sell it in the rest of the world, the FCC is so punch drunk from the beatings it’s taken over the years about susceptibility that it doesn’t even suggest we just grandfather in the IEC 61000-4-x tests.

The net result is that the EU and the others set the standards. Have you ever been to an EMC laboratory where the ESD gun was a cattle prod made in the USA? Or the spike generator was made in West Conshohocken. Guess the cattle prod makers don’t have as big a lobby as the widget manufacturers. The real problem here seems to be that the U.S. manufacturers of test equipment didn’t contribute enough to Blutarskey’s war chest in the ‘80’s.

I can remember a day not so long ago when all the susceptibility test equipment came from North Hollywood and Long Island. Any one been out on Long Island lately? All the old MIL-STD-461 equipment from Long Island even today can be used to do the immunity tests, and most of it still operates better than der other spark-und-zappers. I don’t fully understand why the U.S. still makes high power RF amplifiers. Must have something to do with the good shepherd. However, it’s obvious that they must make an inferior high power log periodic antenna in Texas.

The original susceptibility criteria came out of U.S. military specifications. I can remember sitting in the shielded room with the IFI and the dipoles cranking the frequency and adjusting the length of the dipoles. In those days the limits were 5V/m and with relays and vacuum tubes, everything passed. Now with homeland security and wars against terror it may be time to wind the IFI up again.

I think it’s time to have all commercial equipment meet the MIL-STD-461 requirements for susceptibility if they are to be sold in the U.S. Of course, we can reduce the limits since, in general, a Coke machine doesn’t have to work on the weather deck of a ship when the radars are lit up. Then again with COTS why not go full bore on the susceptibility. After a year or so we could always put together an MRI that would allow 61000 if they allow MIL-STD-461. Do you think we might actually be able to salvage Long Island?