Rohde & Schwarz “Demystifying EMC” 2020 @ Silverstone, UK

It’s that time of year again when one of the things I look forward to the most comes around. No, not Christmas! Where have you been?

Every year, Rohde & Schwarz UK organise their “Demystifying EMC” event, organising technical training on a variety of topics as well as a compact but well formed trade show. 2020 is my third year in a row as an attendee. These last two years, Unit 3 Compliance has had an exhibition stand and I’ve been privileged to give a technical presentation as part of the training available on the day.

This year the Rohde & Schwarz team outdid themselves with record attendance causing them to have to close the registrations for the event early.

Not surprisingly the Unit 3 Compliance stand was as busy as ever with visitors from a wide range of companies and backgrounds, many new faces and some familiar ones from last year stopping by to say ‘hi’.

We also had a demonstration of the effects of poor PCB layout and it’s effect on EMC emissions being picked up by one of our near field probe kits (which flew off the table like hot cakes)

The highlight of my day was getting to deliver another technical talk – amazingly they had me back after last year! – on the subject of ground and grounding for EMC.

Rather than a list of “do this, don’t do this” I really put a lot of background work into this talk, creating images for each slide to try and illustrate clearly some of the concepts I was trying to illustrate.

It seemed to go down really well and I had a lot of positive feedback on the day. Thank you for that, it’s sometimes hard to know if you’ve hit the mark or not. People coming up to me afterwards and saying “you’ve put into words what I’ve been struggling to say for years” and “I’ve really learned something new” makes the many hours spent on preparing this talk well worthwhile.

Whilst a “here’s-a-picture-talk-about-the-picture” makes for a great in person talk, it works very poorly as reference material after the event with just a picture and no text to go with it. So I decided to record the presentation again and push it out on YouTube. Powerpoint has a really nifty record presentation tool that can then export to a video.

So if you didn’t make it to the talk, or want to refer to the talk again, then here’s a link to the video.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you next year.