Well Worth the Price of Admission

In November, I attended the Northeast Product Safety Society (NPSS) Workshop and Vendors Night in Boxborough, MA. Traveling down the two-lane highway in the beautiful countryside just north of Boston, it was hard to imagine that the Holiday Inn nestled among the still-colorful trees would be hosting such an informative and important conference. Of course, I soon discovered that the serene and low-key setting of NPSS was somewhat misleading. The area is teeming with experts that the group taps into to provide ongoing guidance to its members in this critically important compliance area.

NPSS offered 28 sessions on topics ranging from the underlying principles of IEC 61010-1 to designing telecom networks. Attendees could attend up to four sessions—free. Membership is a mere $28, and this volunteer group sponsors eight technical meetings and two semiannual dinners in addition to the annual Workshop and Vendors Night. Speakers at the workshop came from companies such as UL, TUV Rheinland, Associated Research, NTS, and Compliance Worldwide. Speakers like Moe Lamothe provided a wealth of information about the intricacies of critical electrical product- safety standards.

"NPSS has grown to more than 150 paid members since our organization formalized its existence in 1990," says Art Michael, president of NPSS and director of engineering for Product Safety International (Middletown, CT). I note the importance of this meeting because so few conferences focus on electrical product safety. I was reminded recently that product safety means a lot of things to a lot of industries, and electrical is the thread that joins those associated with the groups described here and in my last editorial.

NPSS and IEEE's EMC Product Safety Technical Committee (PSTC) were both born in the late 1980s. "Our organization chose a route different from that of PSTC in that we opted not to align with IEEE. But our grass-roots effort has many of the same goals, and we've always maintained a friendly relationship with the PSTC folks," Michael says. Although they are taking different directions, both organizations actively serve the electrical product-safety community.

The cover story in this issue focuses on the relationship between electrical product safety and EMC. Authors Richard Georgerian and Ron Duffy discuss the value of combining productsafety and conducted emissions tests to enable compliance engineers to determine optimum filter component values. Georgerian and Duffy demonstrate how to meet both sets of requirements together. The bridge between EMC and electrical product safety is critical because a change to solve a product-safety issue may adversely affect EMC and vice versa. Perhaps we will see this issue addressed more, especially with the growth of organizations such as NPSS. For more information on NPSS, visit the group's Web site at http://www.nepss.org.

Sherrie Steward
sherrie.steward@cancom.com

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