3 Reasons to Consider Mobile EMC Compliance Testing Services
- Kathleen Love
- Dec 4
- 5 min read
In an increasingly RF connected world, EMC compliance testing is necessary to ensure products are robust enough to operate in a safe and reliable manner in consumer and commercial environments. Nearly every country has EMC regulations and standards that electronic devices or machines on the market must be compliant with for their intended use. Products that fail to meet electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) compliance can cause interference or disturbances with other electronic devices operating in their environment. This can lead to safety and health issues, reliability issues, and undesired functions in an electronic product. Depending on the EMC standards and industry, electronics products are usually tested for both immunity and radiated emissions, and meet common industry standards such as IEC, FCC, and CISPR.
Unfortunately, achieving full product compliance for EMC can be a time-consuming and expensive process. Typically, hardware is shipped to an EMC lab for testing, which can involve multiple rounds and take months, and you are reliant on the lab’s timeline and schedule. Plus, most new products fail on their first radiated emissions testing pass, which results in additional costly rounds of testing, delayed time to market, more lab scheduling headaches, and more time spent shipping the product back and forth to the testing lab.
Alternatively, you could set up your own EMC lab, which would require carefully selecting and procuring a combination of tools, software, and equipment, as well as allocating permanent space to testing.
If you like the idea of on-site EMC testing at your location but want to avoid the overhead costs of maintaining your own EMC testing lab, there is an alternative. At Signal Edge Solutions, we are pioneering the rising field of mobile EMC testing services to present a third solution that eliminates some of the major pain points of compliance testing. Our mobile lab is a 3-meter semi-anechoic EMC testing chamber that matches the shielding effectiveness of traditional hardwall chambers, with an average shielding effectiveness of over -100 dB in the range of 20 MHz to 40 GHz. Here are 3 reasons to have the lab come to you.
1. Save Time
Mobile EMC testing accelerates your product launch timeline by eliminating weeks of shipping time and allowing you to bypass third-party lab scheduling conflicts, and ensures that your launch schedule stays on track. Launching on time is critical to the success of a product. Delays in a product launch can lead to millions in lost revenue, making or breaking a year in sales. Opting for mobile EMC lab services can shift your schedule back to the left and keep your launch on track by alleviating two major pinch points: product shipping time and working around 3rd party lab schedules.
Utilizing a traditional EMC compliance testing lab puts your product launch schedule at the mercy of the testing lab. You operate on their schedule and their timeline. Since most products fail on their first test pass, you need time to troubleshoot design failures, and sometimes the ability to quickly retest is crucial to your team's success. However, your engineering team may need to wait weeks for the lab to be available to re-test your product, then factor in back-and-forth shipping time and a new troubleshooting session.
Our mobile lab services reverse this dynamic. Instead of shipping products back and forth to the lab, the mobile lab comes directly to you, along with an expert EMC engineer. We perform EMC testing on your time, on your schedule, at your convenience. Our mobile lab is ready to go when you need it. Upon arrival, our RF-shielded mobile lab instantly puts a 3-meter EMC test chamber inside your facility. Our EMC engineer will test, troubleshoot, and design solutions with your team in real time to help you engineer first-pass testing success for your product and avoid multiple rounds of testing. This cuts out weeks of back-and-forth shipping time and coordinating timing with a testing lab. If your development schedule demands fast solutions, our experts will get you there.
2. Save Costs
Mobile EMC Testing reduces overall costs by eliminating travel, per diem, and hotel expenses for your engineering team, and minimizes the need for costly retesting rounds by troubleshooting on the spot.
Off-site EMC testing services can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000 per day. This can rack up a bill of $35,000 for a week of testing alone, not to mention the testing company’s engineering time or the cost of sending your own engineers to the lab. Multiple rounds of testing can cause travel, testing, and engineering costs to add up fast, in addition to taking your team out of your lab. By bringing the EMC testing site to your lab and keeping your engineers on-site, you can save thousands on flights, hotels, per diem expenses, and lost engineering time. And with our EMC engineering experts troubleshooting and engineering solutions with your team, you can avoid costly extra rounds of testing and problems related to electromagnetic interference (EMI).
While you can also avoid these costs by maintaining your own in-house EMC testing facility, doing so incurs high overhead costs. Acquiring an RF/EMI shielded testing enclosure is a substantial investment, and adding in the costs of testing equipment, the lab space for a 3-meter semi-anechoic test enclosure, and keeping EMC specialists on staff can make in-house testing a daunting prospect for many engineering companies. This is where the turnkey solution of mobile EMC testing comes in. Because you only pay for the time you need, mobile EMC testing allows you to dodge the overhead costs of maintaining an in-house testing setup while keeping the benefits of having compliance testing on site.
3. Co-engineer with EMC Experts
Co-engineering with dedicated EMC specialists in your lab accelerates your design cycle and ensures reliable, manufacturable solutions are developed and tested in real-time. At Signal Edge Solutions, we are committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in EMC compliance. Our team of EMC experts brings years of engineering experience to help you troubleshoot reasons for non-compliance. We will help your team to engineer reliable, manufacturable solutions to your design challenges and implement those solutions to ensure testing success.
If you’d like to learn more about what our mobile EMC compliance testing services (or RF testing services) can do for your project, you can reach out to us at info@signaledgesolutions.com or visit our services page.
For more of our insights into the fields of EMC and RF, check out the further reading below.
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