the morning after a wind and lightning storm i found that i had a 20 over nine
power-line noise problem on 160 meters on my triband beam it peaked north east
on 20 meters i waited a couple of days to do anything about it because i
knew that our small electric cooperative was overwhelmed with repairs but when
there was no improvement i took it on myself to try to locate the problem
tuning my car radio to a blank space between two stations on am i drove north
on the main road up our canyon about a mile north the noise became very loud
on the car radio and as i approached a side road it became overwhelming as
soon as i turned on the side road i saw the problem the lower neutral wire was
down and lying on the ground between the first two light poles on the spur line
going down the road i checked the first pole beyond the break and found that
i could get a spark off the ground wire on the side of the pole i called the
electric cooperative and they sent out a crew and strung a new line between the
poles surprisingly none of the four residences on the quarter mile long line
past the break had reported the downed line and had not experienced an outage
of electric service the 7200 volt transformers at each residence had been
connected to the neutral side of the transmission line through the ground wires
on the individual poles even though the ground conductivity here in the desert
is extremely poor after the new wires were installed the noise from that
source was significantly reduced
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