How do military standards and testing differ to the commercial EMC test standards?

The driving force behind Commercial Test Standards and testing is EU legislation. The driving force behind Military testing is usually contractual requirement. Different areas of the world have different military test standards, the UK has Def Stan, the US has Mil Std. In addition to this there are product specific military standards, EFA for Euro fighter as an example and also product family specs such as the RTCA specs for airborne equipments and systems so in that way there are similarities to Commercial standards.

In general the military test standards, while quoting similar tests to the Commercial ones, tend to be to severer levels to ensure that the equipment is fit for purpose in its intended environment with additional specialist tests that commercial specs don’t cover.

As an example, a multi role piece of military communications equipment intended for land force and naval use as well as being aircraft mountable would require testing to a complete Def Stan suite of tests to ensure that it was fit for purpose in all 3 environments. It may also require some additional tests from the RTCA specs to ensure that the equipment met the airborne equipment requirements and if this equipment was also being marketed to other countries that had adopted the Mil Std approach then a gap analysis of the tests that had been carried out compared to the Mil Std requirement would need to be done and any Mil Std test differences would also need to be addressed.

In addition to this, many larger military systems and installations require an amount of commercial testing in addition to the Military testing carried out. The Type 45 destroyer was required to meet both Def Stan requirements and also some commercial maritime test standards as well.

 

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