scope:

This part of CISPR 16-4 gives guidance on the treatment of uncertainties to those who are involved in the development or modification of CISPR electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) standards. In addition, this part provides useful background information for those who apply the standards and the uncertainty aspects in practice.

The objectives of this part are:

a) to identify the parameters or sources governing the uncertainty associated with the statement that a given product complies with the requirement specified in a CISPR recommendation. This uncertainty will be called 'standards compliance uncertainty' (abbreviated as SCU, see 3.16);

b) to give guidance on the estimation of the magnitude of the standards compliance uncertainty;

c) to give guidance for the implementation of the standards compliance uncertainty into the compliance criterion of a CISPR standardised compliance test.

As such, this part can be considered as a handbook that can be used by standards writers to incorporate and harmonise uncertainty considerations in existing and future CISPR standards. This part also gives guidance to regulatory authorities, accreditation bodies and test engineers to judge the performance quality of an EMC test-laboratory carrying out CISPR standardised compliance tests. The uncertainty considerations given in this part can also be used as guidance when comparing test results (and its uncertainties) obtained by using different alternative test methods.

The uncertainty of a compliance test also relates to the probability of occurrence of an electromagnetic interference (EMI) problem in practice. This aspect is recognized and introduced briefly in this part. However, the problem of relating uncertainties of a compliance test to the occurrence of EMI in practice is not considered within the scope of this part.

The scope of this part is limited to all the relevant uncertainty considerations of a standardized EMC compliance test.