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Re: [RFI] USB qrm - what to do?

To: rfi@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [RFI] USB qrm - what to do?
From: Gary Smith via RFI <rfi@contesting.com>
Reply-to: Gary Smith <wa6fgi@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 09:19:19 -0700
List-post: <rfi@contesting.com">mailto:rfi@contesting.com>
How is your station grounded? Trusting the old "attach it to the water pipe, that'll be fine"? Sounds like ground looping to me.

Most ground looping problems, to me this is what your describing, can be cured by going back to the basics. That is, a 6 or 8 foot ground rod driven into the dirt (ground) nearest your shack. If you can't find or don't want to spend the bux for 1.5 wide copper strapping, take a old piece of coax, marry the center conductor to the shield, then rung it into the shack. Hook each piece of equipment to the coax, (don't series them) see if that doens' help reduce the noise level. Sounds as if you have lots of little antennas looking for any signal of any kind, and, finding quite a few.

Gary...wa6fgi


On 3/13/2017 7:48 AM, Robert Nobis wrote:
Pete,

Besides using quality shielded USB cables, make sure that your computer is also 
separately grounded to your common station ground with a one inch ground strap. In 
other words don’t rely on the ground pin of the AC power line.

73,


Bob Nobis
n7rjn@nobis.net


On Mar 13, 2017, at 04:31, Pete Smith N4ZR <n4zr@comcast.net> wrote:

My shack computer has 6 different USB devices attached.  When I disconnect all 
but the keyboard, it cuts the background noise level on 160M by a whopping 25 
dB, from S9+18 down to S8 (as monitored by HDSDR and my QS1R, calibrated by an 
Elecraft XG3).

What is to be done?  It doesn't seemvery feasible to wind each usb cable on a 
small type 31 toroid and get enough attenuation .  Available snap-ons all seem 
to roll off dramatically below 25 MHz. Can a common mode filter be built using 
discrete components that will have decent attenuation at 160 M? Or, maybe, is 
such a filter available commercially?  I have Googled and reviewed K9YC's 
tutorial but found nothing directly apposite.

Thanks for any ideas!


--

73, Pete N4ZR
Check out the Reverse Beacon Network
at <http://reversebeacon.net>, now
spotting RTTY activity worldwide.
For spots, please use your favorite
"retail" DX cluster.

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