The 38th meeting of the Administrative Cooperation Group in the scope of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Directive (EMC ADCO) was held last 21-23 April in Vilnius, Lithuania. The meeting was chaired by Stephan Winkleman from the German regulatory authority and attended by 38 representatives from 24 member states and three observer states, along with a European Commission (EC) representative.
The following stand out among issues considered the meeting:
- Lithuania’s Communications Regulatory Authority (RRT) is responsible for market oversight in that country. It has its own laboratories, accredited per standard EN ISO/IEC17025, to test equipment in the scope of the Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment (R&TTE) and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Directives. Note that because tests are not destructive the tested equipment is afterwards returned to manufacturers/distributors. The costs of testing equipment, whether or not in compliance, are borne by the RRT, as current laws envisage no alternative. This situation will change when the new EMC Directive is transposed; it aims for costs to be charged to manufacturers/distributors when equipment is found to be non-compliant;
- Proposals for future market control campaigns – the next European market control campaigns will focus on the following devices: electrical toys, inductive products, power line communication (PLC) products, chargers and printers. According to the information sent out, 14 countries will take part in those campaigns. The chair indicated that countries which find it financially difficult to support testing of the samples received can use for that purpose and without cost the laboratory services of BNetzA, the German market oversight authority, as done in the past;
- Risk evaluation in the scope of the EMC Directive. It is often hard to determine the effect of non-compliant equipment on other equipment, especially when essential EMC requisites are not complied with and other radio services and equipment are affected. Risk evaluation will only be applied starting in April 2016, with the new EMC Directive. A working group has been set up to determine risk evaluation methodologies, with the participation of some member states;
- Insulation of coaxial cables – there are many complaints regarding electromagnetic compatibility problems regarding cables that link TV and radio receivers, owing to their insufficient insulation. It is also noted, for example, that with the digital dividend there will certainly be problems when long term evolution (LTE) telephony occurs in the digital dividend channels. Even with the problems listed, there is no way around this. The EC should not ask standardisation bodies to draw up harmonised standards for this kind of situation, because cables are explicitly excluded from the directive and existing standards for cables are applied on a voluntary basis. Germany will impose national laws for cabling, because the voluntary certification system has not worked as well as in other member states such as the Netherlands.
The next meeting of this group will be held on 21-24 October 2015 in France.
