Hi Mike,
I hope we can all collectively rethink RFI suppression a bit.
It is electrically impossible for a device to transfer *significant* common
mode on 160 meters or other low frequencies without some other low impedance
terminal to push against. If it does have common mode, it will be very hard
to suppress it with a bead or choke because the source impedance will be
very high.
Imagine a florescent light fixture with a two or three wire cord entering,
insulated, with no other path. Let's exclude direct radiation, since a 4
foot fixture makes a poor antenna and it is a long distance from the
receiving antenna.
There are two ways it can excite the wiring:
1.) Differential mode between the wires that enter via one cord.
2.) Common mode on the cord that the fixture pushes in differential to the
lamp housing. Since a floating housing is an extremely high impedance on
160, the housing moves around a lot more in voltage than any wiring and
becomes a fairly weak E-field dominant source.
When you throw beads at that system because everyone else throws beads at
things, it solves neither problem. For common mode, the beads would have to
add an impedance the same sign (capacitive) or extremely high resistance
compared to the reactance of the fixture to space around the fixture. The
last thing you would probably want is inductive reactance, because it would
increase common mode current.
If it is differential mode excitation of the wires entering the fixture, you
can add all the beads you want over the cord wire group and you do nothing
at all. The beads change the common mode, but the excitation is differential
mode. The differential mode is largely unaffected by the beads.
This is the result of poor analysis and poor planning, and is why people
have to sometimes resort to unnecessarily high choking impedances for baluns
and RFI suppression. I can site many dozens of examples where a single
jumper wire or bypass capacitor has hundreds of times more effect than
beads.
Thanks for your thoughts. I looked at things here just now, and found that
(1) unplugging my amplifier's power cord and (2) disconnecting an unused
50' run of RG-213 from my main TX antenna switch drastically drops that
noise. :-)
That doesn't surprise me in the least. It simply means there is some
differential excitation between the TX system grounding and the mains being
excited by the lamp(s).
I had a problem with a switching supply in a battery charger in a neighbor's
house differentially exciting the mains. I could connect and disconnect
things and change the levels. To cure it, since I didn't have access to the
source, I put a bypass capacitor in a plug and moved it around my house to
different outlets. I found an outlet that made the noise virtually go away.
If I had access to the charger, the cure would have been a bypass at the
battery charger.
The only way a choke would have any effect would be if separate independent
chokes were on each wire leaving the charger.
73 Tom
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