> From: Jim Smith <jimsmith@shaw.ca>
> Hmm... If you're in an illegal state would there be any benefit/risk in
> simply reporting your suspicions to the DEA along with documentation
> linking grow op lighting to RFI and your current RFI environment?
I think that would be opening a can of worms you would rather keep closed.
Not to condone breaking any laws, but I would much rather have someone in the
house next door minding his own business and growing a little weed for his own
consumption using a clean grow light, than someone growing flowers for his
church altar using a noisy one. Besides, I don't want to start hearing of
people having their doors busted down in SWAT raids because they had a crappy
plasma TV or the wrong brand of grow lights illuminating their garden
seedlings. And you certainly don't want to do anything to invite retaliation
from people involved in a criminal enterprise. RFI is best left to the FCC if a
government agency is to be involved.
But it wouldn't hurt to spread the word as far and as wide as we can via the
mainstream media as well as through speciality publications like High Times,
that RFI can be serious with many of the grow lights presently in use, and that
this radiation can easily be pinpointed from a considerable distance away by
anyone with a portable receiver including government agents, FCC and otherwise.
Most of the people causing this particular RFI problem are likely to be a
little paranoid to begin with, which we might as well exploit to the fullest
while we can.
And as Ed said, the AM broadcast frequencies are close enough to the lower
frequency ham bands that passing RFI to 160m or 80m as interference to the AM
broadcast band wouldn't be stretching the imagination very far. Likewise,
"broadcast reception" could include listening to the 19m short wave band to
pick up the BBC World Service (IMO a more reliable unbiased news service that
most local media), which is close enough to cover 20m interference, and so on.
Our local power company is very good about fixing noise problems if I pinpoint
the exact source myself and report it to the right people, but they are not so
good at tracking it down themselves.
I have sensed a faint chuckle from power company personnel in the past when I
reported line noise problems and mentioned "ham radio" in the conversation, so
I always pass it off as causing interference to my broadcast reception since
they seem to take BCI claims far more seriously. Perhaps this is a spin-off
from the days of the CB boom, and like it or not, the majority of the public
to-day wouldn't know the difference between amateur radio and CB nor even care.
TV, movies and other entertainment media have left the public with an image of
CB as something laughable, not to be taken seriously. Maybe not all power
companies are like mine; YMMV.
Don, k4kyv
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