This paper describes in detail the criteria for the design of a mobile laboratory for the characterization and measurement of manmade electromagnetic noise in the urban, suburban, and rural environment. A significant difference from previous similar measurements is the bandwidth of the receiving system, which is here of the order of 1 MHz. A simple model is proposed to describe the impulsive noise together with a series of experiments to validate the model and determine the significant necessary parameters. The detailed requirements for each of the subsystems of the mobile laboratory are discussed and some typical results obtained in trial runs are presented.