At 7:59 PM -0500 10/17/02, N4OX@webtv.net wrote:
>Has anyone on the list lived near, very near a 100,000 watt FM broadcast
>station tower?... I would like to talk to anyone who has had a ham
>station located "close" to a tower like this to find out if there
>were any RF problems.
Interesting question, and I look forward to reading the other
responses. I expect that the answer depends strongly on whether your
hamming is on HF or on VHF. I live about 1 km away from the site of
an FM broadcast station (power unknown) and a 5-kW, three-tower, AM
broadcast station. Another, 50-kW, AM station is about 3 km away.
(I just queried the FCC database and found the AM station's license
data but not the FM station's data. I wonder whether the FM
operation is defunct.) IIRC, a calibrated broadband field-strength
measurement in my driveway showed 0.25 volts per meter. When I first
moved here, you could hear both AM stations on all of the telephones,
and the 80-m ham band was full of strong intermod products involving
not only these two but many other AM stations. A couple of years
and >$1k worth of ferrite and brute-force LC filters later, all was
quiet; but it was a lot of work tracking down and then fixing all the
non-ohmic (i.e., nonlinear I-vs.V) connections in the house. I will
say that it was interesting and educational. You would not believe
how many unintended RF mixers are in an ordinary house.
I am strictly an HF operator, and I have never detected the slightest
problem from the FM transmitter. I have no idea what an FM receiver
here would hear.
73 de Chuck, W1HIS
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