I'll clarify my comment on the antenna end: If you do a standard pattern (a yagi, a quarter-length dipole, or whatnot), it's well-understood. What's deep voodoo are the radiation patterns from complex shapes. I've seen research projects where this is basically just done numerically -- a computer tries a bunch of shapes, computes their radiation patterns, and you get bizarre antennas.
EMC looks a lot more like the latter than the former. Our design had a PCB with several daughterboards, and a whole bunch of cables going in and out. That was voodoo. We'd add shielding. Emissions would go up. Or down. There was little rhyme or reason.
But in the end, we didn't break the bank. We went to the test facility twice, I think. We didn't have any sensible kit in-house, but we did have a scope with an FFT function, and we could make loops our of wire. We couldn't measure in real units, but we got a sense of when things went up and when they went down. And, I think, we had a healthy dose of luck.
I totally believe your equipment was superior than commercial. For defense, you want things like stealth and rad-hard. For us, we just want basic compliance.
I'll clarify my comment on the antenna end: If you do a standard pattern (a yagi, a quarter-length dipole, or whatnot), it's well-understood. What's deep voodoo are the radiation patterns from complex shapes. I've seen research projects where this is basically just done numerically -- a computer tries a bunch of shapes, computes their radiation patterns, and you get bizarre antennas.
EMC looks a lot more like the latter than the former. Our design had a PCB with several daughterboards, and a whole bunch of cables going in and out. That was voodoo. We'd add shielding. Emissions would go up. Or down. There was little rhyme or reason.
But in the end, we didn't break the bank. We went to the test facility twice, I think. We didn't have any sensible kit in-house, but we did have a scope with an FFT function, and we could make loops our of wire. We couldn't measure in real units, but we got a sense of when things went up and when they went down. And, I think, we had a healthy dose of luck.
I totally believe your equipment was superior than commercial. For defense, you want things like stealth and rad-hard. For us, we just want basic compliance.