Developments in the Description of Electromagnetic Environments

Information about the electromagnetic environment which exists at locations where equipment is intended to be operated is an essential precondition for the achievement of electromagnetic compatibility. The necessity of such a knowledge results from the fact that suitable immunity requirements can be concluded from corresponding data regarding the electromagnetic environment. Appropriate information can be obtained by various approaches such as site surveys or technical assessments accompanied by evaluations of technical literature. The description of a general electromagnetic environment should consider a multitude of phenomena having a broad spectrum of parameters. Such a general description, however, is not helpful in many cases because it would imply that immunity against all such phenomena has to be taken into consideration. A more practical approach consists in introducing a classification scheme which gives a correlation between locations and the electromagnetic phenomena existing there. This approach forms the basis of the EMC publication IEC 61000-2-5. Because of continuous change of existing technologies or introduction of new ones, electromagnetic environments in a certain respect change fundamentally. This is very obvious in case of all the recently introduced radio and communication services with the generation of electromagnetic fields in the frequency range above 1 GHz. Hence the need arises to monitor continuously electromagnetic environment and to adapt its description. Such an adaptation is currently being done by a working group of IEC TC 77. The results of its work should be object of the next edition of IEC 61000-2-5. The present status as well as expected changes will be discussed in this paper.