A little over a year ago, my new neighbor put up a nice flagpole in his front
yard, with some low-voltage spotlights controlled by a LV power supply with a
photocell. Every evening, about sunset, 80 and 160 meters suddenly had a
terrible noise level - I could even drive by his house listening to the AM
broadcast band in the car and hear the racket.
I took my portable FT-817 HF transceiver out with me while walking around, and
found that the noise was indeed coming from his place. Once I found out exactly
where all the noise was coming from, I took my AM portable radio over and
showed the neighbor. and I covered/uncovered the photocell, turning on and off
the noise along with the flagpole spotlights. When he saw what was happening,
he told me to go ahead and unplug the supply completely (feeding the
spotlights), and agreed to bury the LV wire instead of leaving it lying on the
ground from the supply to the lights.
Some of these LV supplies can make a huge amount of noise! Same with my laptop
PC supply - I have to unplug the supply and run on batteries only, if I want to
work 160/80/40 Meters while it's on. I've tried toroids on the supply line
(input and output) and the phone line - no help at all. I hope that DXpeditions
try their logging PCs and networks thoroughly before leaving on a big trip,
otherwise, they may be logging by hand and manually entering the contacts into
the PC log later, when they find out the PCs keep them from hearing weak
signals.
The noise I was picking up was on both an 80-Meter dipole, and a multiband
vertical, several hundred feet from the noisy flagpole spotlights.
LJ
-----Original Message-----
>From: anthony <k2vi@cox.net>
>Sent: Jan 26, 2010 3:05 PM
>To: towertalk@contesting.com
>Subject: [TowerTalk] FOUND THE NOISE PROBLEM
>
>Gene mentioned the ouside light. The light is a motion sensor type. When I
>turned the inside switch off the noise disappeared. YAAAY!! Thanks to everyone
>who helped me on this one. You guys are A#1. now I need to go to lowes and
>purchase a new non sensor type light. The sensor is great when you walk up to
>the door at night but my SW dxing takes presidence. 73s
>
>tony k2vi
>_______________________________________________
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>TowerTalk mailing list
>TowerTalk@contesting.com
>http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
|