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After EMC+SIPI Dallas: the lab world still is not the bag world

IEEE EMC+SIPI 2026 ran August 3–7 in Dallas. That room talks shielding effectiveness, standards, and enclosures. Most Faraday bag listings still talk “military grade.” The gap is the point of Faraday Zone.

Published August 20, 2026

What the symposium actually is

EMC+SIPI is the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society’s annual symposium: sessions, workshops, and an exhibition for people who measure interference and integrity on hardware. 2026 was at the Hilton Anatole, Dallas, August 3–7. Exhibits ran mid-week. Faraday Zone was not an exhibitor. This is a reading of the event’s job, not a booth recap.

The program language is IEEE 299, MIL-STD, TEMPEST-adjacent rooms, tents, filters, and chip-level EMC. That is the industrial cage side of this catalog: Select Fabricators, Holland Shielding, Aaronia, Shieldex, YSHIELD.

What bag shoppers should take from it

A dB number without frequency, method, and date is not a symposium paper. It is a slogan. If a bag brand cites IEEE 299 or MIL-STD-188-125, the follow-up is the PDF: which enclosure, which band, which lab.

Consumer Faraday bags fail at openings. Symposium culture already knows slots leak. Magnetic folds, roll-tops, and Velcro are the bag version of a poorly bonded door.

What not to take from it

A five-day EMC symposium does not rank SLNT against Mission Darkness. It does not tell you whether a leather sleeve’s front pocket is a cage (it is not). It does not replace a phone-in-a-bag smoke test, and a smoke test does not replace a shielding curve.

Faraday Zone will keep lab EMC events on the calendar because cages and materials live there. Bag roundups stay on Best. The next European stop on that industrial calendar is EMC Europe in Prague.

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