Faraday Bag Testing
Following the conception of small electronic devices and their applications in recent times, there is a growing need to determine and test the shielding properties or shielding effectiveness (SE) of their enclosures. In this paper, we discuss how a reverberation chamber technique employing a comb generator can be used to measure the shielding SE of such enclosure. The comb generator has been a necessary test instrument for electromagnetic (EMC) test labs over the years and because of its ease of operation, it has found application in a variety of EMC test measurements such as cable loss measurement and radiation emission system test.
We present here the result of testing the SE of a Faraday enclosure bag in a small RC-like cavity employing a broadband bowtie receive antenna and the same test procedure conducted at a 1 metre distance from a receive antenna in a standard mode stirred reverberation chamber (MSRC). The striking positive correlation between these test results seem to suggest that SE tests of Faraday bags can be conducted in an RC-like cavity which is significantly less costly and offers a cheap alternative.
