This article completely omits a section on when external accreditation. For many products you can get CE marking or similar with in-house testing.

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crote 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As far as I can tell, this distinction is mostly meaningless in practice.

Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing.

Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?

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chambertime 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, this article is really focused on FCC certification. But to your point, there are other sections on the site that are focused on CE certification and how to navigate getting certified so you can sell throughout the world.

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c-c-c-c-c 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU.

In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.

	▲	adrian_b 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In-house EMC testing is practically always required before you go to an external lab, unless you want to waste a lot of money by discovering at the lab that your device cannot be certified. When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
	▲	chambertime 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.