Lecture Series: MIL-STD-461 + EMC Fundamentals
REGISTER NOW
March 7th -- July 11th, 2025
$45 per lecture or $395 for 10
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48
Days
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12
Hours
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50
Minutes
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30
Seconds
Karen Burnham
President and Chief Engineer of EMC United
Online via Zoom
Following this event, you will receive:
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Presentation slides
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Recording available through July 31st, 2025
Lecture series abstract:
Have you ever been reading through one of these standards and wished for a little more comprehensive guidance? MIL-STD-461, MIL-STD-464, and RTCA DO160 are key EMC standards for anyone working in defense or aerospace. They are ubiquitous and important–but not always intuitive or easy to grasp on first reading. In this course we are going to go section-by-section through the EMC-relevant portions of these three documents. Any time we get to a topic that’s a little outside of what people normally learn in engineering school (and not many of us were lucky enough to have a dedicated EMC professor in college), we’re going to stop and walk through the fundamental EMC principles that inform why these standards are written the way they are.
Along the way we’re going to compare how different standards tackle the same topics–not just the three listed above, but also AIAA-S-121, GSFC-STD-7000, and SMC-S-008, along with a few other informative documents. We’ll be diving deep into the appendices to glean every last “lessons learned” nugget and kernel of wisdom. We’ll talk about requirements tailoring and test setups, plus common errors you might see in test plans or labs. We’ll treat EMC like the Systems discipline that it is, looking at how engineering fields like EE, RF, mechanical, aerospace, and systems all intersect with Physics to bring about EMC problems–and all the ways you can use these standards to try to prevent EMC problems from derailing a project during testing.
Depending on which lab you ask, 50 – 90% of units fail EMC testing on their first pass. This course aims to help you understand the ins and outs of aerospace/defense EMC testing to give you the best possible chance of passing the first time.
BUNDLE: 10 lectures for $395
OR purchase individual lectures at $45 each:
Fill out the form below, specify the number of lectures you’d like to attend using the + button above the subtotal (on the next page), and proceed with payment.
Within 24 hours of your purchase, Lucy will email you to put you on the list of the lectures you plan to attend.
Email Lucy if you have any questions.
If you’ve ever felt confused reading sections of MIL-STD-461, MIL-STD-464, or DO160, this is the webinar series for you! In ten lectures of two hours each, spread out over five months, we’ll deep dive into the standards, the fundamentals, and have plenty of time for interactive Q&A. Designed to be convenient for the working (and over-worked, over-stressed) EMC engineer (or engineer thrown into the EMC whirlwind without a ton of guidance), we hope you’ll join us for this informative webinar series, either for the whole course or for only those lectures focused on a topic of particular interest.
Lecture topics and dates:
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Lecture 1 -- March 7th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o Introduction—What is EMC and why do we care?
- o Systems engineering
- o MIL-STD-464: Sections 3.5 to 5.2.4
- o Topics:
- • EMI Safety Margins
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Lecture 2 -- March 21st, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-464 Section 5.3
- o Topics:
- • Defining external electromagnetic environment
- • Unintentional antennas
- • Impedance
- • Non-ideal component behavior
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Lecture 3 -- April 4th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-464 Section 5.3 to 5.5
- o Topics:
- • Loop antennas
- • Enclosures/slot antennas
- • Lightning
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Lecture 4 -- April 18th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-464 Section 5.6 – 5.15
- o Topics:
- • Magnetic fields, shielding
- • Near field vs. Far field
- • ESD, P-static
- • Bonding
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Lecture 5 -- May 2nd, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 Section 1.1 to 4.2.6
- o Topics:
- • Grounding
- • Filtering
- • Switching noise
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Lecture 6 -- May 16th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 Section 4.3 to 4.3.8.5
- o Topics:
- • EMC test environments
- • LISNs
- • EMC test equipment
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Lecture 7 -- May 30th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 Section 4.3.8.6 to 4.3.8.6.2
- o Topics:
- • Cable shielding
- • Transfer impedance
- • Skin depth
- • Measuring shielding effectiveness
- • Transmission lines
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Lecture 8 -- June 13, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 Section 4.3.8.7 to 5.2
- o Topics:
- • Susceptibility monitoring
- • Measurement bandwidth
- • Specific test applicability
- • Qual-by-sim requests
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Lecture 9 -- June 27, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 CE101, CE102, CS101, CS114, CS115, CS116, CS118
- o DO160 Sections 18, 19.3.5, 20.4, 21.4, 25
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Lecture 10 -- July 11th, 2025 from 10 AM to 12 PM PT
- o MIL-STD-461 RE102, RS103
- o DO160 Sections 20.5, 20.6, 21.5, 21.6
About Karen Burnham
Karen Burnham has worked in and around the aerospace, defense, automotive, and broader consulting world since 1996. She has a BS in Physics, an MS in Electrical Engineering, and a talent for translating EMC to English. She has managed requirements and test planning for NASA and the Dream Chaser spaceship and others. She has done troubleshooting on electric vehicles for Ford Motor Company and others. She has initiated innovative SBIRs and STTRs through government centers and worked on classified programs. She has consulted on projects across a wide swath of industries and sits on multiple international standards committees, landing her in her current role of Vice President of Standards for the IEEE EMC Society. Ms. Burnham founded EMC United, Inc. in 2024 in order to focus on helping companies and hardware designers solve EMC problems, ideally before they even start. She believes that, far from being black magic, EMC can be understandable (and even fun!), and she hopes to spread that passion more widely.
