Between Solar, and Grow Lights, Amateur Radio is becoming useless in
towns. I visited a friend that lives about 3 miles out of town, his
background noise level is S3, or S4 on 40 at night. Mine is 20 over 18
hours a day, but was S5 or S6 prior to December 7th, last year. I have
had about a month of RFI free operating time this year between two
horticultural lighting operations, one was cooperative, the other is
not, the FCC should now be involved with the latter.
I can't imagine what is going to happen to the CA Amateurs over the next
few years if this is not put under control.
73s and thanks,
Dave
NK7Z
https://www.nk7z.net
On 06/28/2018 01:43 AM, Tony wrote:
All:
Some of you may recall that I've been dealing with RFI generated by a
neighbors solar panel installation since the day it was installed in
August of 2016. I promptly notified Solar Edge, the manufacturer, about
the noise and they acknowledged (eventually) that their components were
the cause of the RFI.
Solar Edge: https://www.solaredge.com/us/home
Update:
Last week, on June 21st, Solar Edge sent a contractor (Solar City) to
install RFI suppression to eliminate the RFI. The engineers from Solar
Edge told me that they guaranteed it would work and that they've
installed this type of RFI suppression many times before.
Unfortunately, it had little to no effect. They used small clamp-on
ferrite cores at the optimizers (noise generators) with one turn of
cable around each core. The reason they gave for not using a large
ferrite with multiple turns was that multiple turns could damage the
cables -- go figure.
They apologized for not solving the problem and are now flying their
engineers in from the west coast to New York to inspect the work done by
the installer. Once again, they assured me that problem will be solved.
In my case, my neighbors installation is 150 feet from my antennas yet
the RFI is strong at that distance. It's heard on 30 through 10 meters
so HF is essentially unusable during the day while the system is active.
My advise to my fellow hams is this: take a good look around your
neighborhood and notice the number of solar panel systems popping up
everywhere. Imagine trying to figure out which system among them is
causing RFI and the task of knocking on doors to find out who
manufactured the system or who the responsible party is.
Solar panel systems are not going away so the potential for RFI issues
are likely to become widespread. In fact, California plans on making
solar panels mandatory on new homes beginning in 2020.
I think most would agree that it's time for the ARRL and other advocates
to make a serious effort to let the FCC know how serious a problem this
is. Signed petitions by the 160,000 members of the ARRL sent to local
congressmen might be a good place to start.
Or, we can sit on our asses and say goodbye to HF.
Tony -K2MO
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