Ofcom in UK proposes harder emission rules on products

[kdst]

I just found this new proposal from Ofcom in UK which is quite intersting for manfucaturers of Products containing radio. It's a proposed regulation which aims to give better ways to enforce emission comliane of prodcts after the have been sold and beingin use by the end customer:

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/con...n=consultation

For me as resposible for a department which work with CE-marking and approvals or a couple of 1000 different products, this is an interesting and in my view also very important proposal. We have internally developed, but also many third party and impored products (OEM rebranded). Many of the companies we are working with do their tests and reports, but often it seems like it's only important to get any kind of report, which not always covers all relevan use cases. This means that the product can seem to be correctly tested and declared for EMC and/or R&TTE directives, but when reading the reports it becomes obvious that some use cases, interfaces or combinations are missing. Since the end user only can request to see the declaration of confomity but not the test reports, it's too often manufacturers cheat and only test a minimum to be able to fill in the EN-standards in the declaration.

This new regualation would though put more requirements at the end user that emission levels are not excedded, both in terms of how the product is used but also covering changes due to age and faults. So if a product fails and start to disturb others,the authorities will be able to take action, and when this happens the end users will of course come back to us manufacturer.

This regulation covers the time after the product is put on the market or put into service, ie. not just when the product is sold by the original manufacturer, but the entire lifetime.


This proposal will though not cover fixed installations where the installer anyway already today have a responsibility for the emission prerformance, but any kind of mobile or consumer type of equipment will be covered.


Some may think that this is unneccessary and too much control, but I like it, even though it will give my company some more things to consider especially when importing products.