Rohde & Schwarz; The One Stop Shop For EMC

Rohde & Schwarz is an international company headquartered in Munich. For 60 years the company group has been designing and marketing a range of electronic products. The organisation employs in excess of 4,400 people and is represented in over 70 countries throughout the world.

No one could legitimately argue that throughout the years the name of Rohde &Schwarz has not been synonymous with high quality and innovative products. Perhaps a consequence of this has been to create the erroneous perception of that organisation as a solely top end of the EMC market supplier. In reality the company maintains a serious interest in all market levels, currently manufacturing test instruments, accessories and software-supervised turnkey solutions to equate with the demands and budgets from pre-compliance systems and stand alone instruments up to the worlds most complex and comprehensive EMC installations.

An example of this is their latest promotion for a pre-compliance emission system the ESPC, which when combined with a user friendly Windows software package, is available for only £9,995.

It is of particular interest that the Windows® based software for integrated pre-compliance systems has been written and developed in the UK. Significantly, the reason forawrded for this was that pre-compliance measurements in the Uk have traditionally led the rest of Europe.

The R & S commitment is exemplified by the installation at Greding in the south of Germany. This is, without doubt, Europe's largest, most modern and most completely equipped EMC test site. Central to this is the vast anechoic chamber measuring 41 x 16 meters and 14 meters high (shown left).

Within this chamber are three turntables, two designed for 500 Kg and one of which is a 9 meter hydraulically operated system having a load bearing capacity of 60 tonnes. Among the items which have been tested are automobiles, aircraft and complete computer and control installations. To maintain integrity within the chamber all control lines for the turntables and antenna rotation are wither fibre optic or hydraulic. The measuring complex comprises three modular computer controlled systems providing a total frequency coverage from 20 Hz through to 40 GHz.

Keith also makes the point that it is not just the up market items to be tested which require the highest quality test equipment. It is important for companies producing very high volume items which may be relatively low cost to know that they can reliably evaluate their products to pass without unnecessarily over exceeding the limits. In such circumstances erroneous measurements which may result in over-engineering and the consequent use of unnecessary components could, and indeed have in the past, proven to be very costly.

In addition to test and measurement, the Rohde &Schwarz group of companies is presently active in the following fields:

• Professional radio communications.
• Broadcasting and paging.
• Radiomonitoring and radiolocation.
• IT security.

It will be no surprise that actual market shares and size of the business segment are closely guarded secrets. It is, however, no secret that last years combined company turnover was in the region of 1.2 billion DM so assuming the EMC business represents even a few percent of this it would be quite a significant segment.

Rohde and Schwarz have a long established tradition of providing educational guidance for industry, in this respect EMC is no exception. Two new guides have been made available, comprising a comprehensive CD ROM and an informative wall chart outlining international standards together with the recommended test equipment.