With help from Mike Martin, RFI Services (a great guy) and my local
utility (they loaned me all their Radar Engineering tools) and a very
cooperative city engineer and
the archive at this group I was able to rectify my RFI problem in just a
short time.
The problem: Power line noise S9 + on most ham bands in SSB mode
including 6 meters. In AM mode you can imagine how loud it was!
The pole was located about 4/10 of a mile as the crow flies from my QTH.
I started with a small 19" square loop tuned to 40 meters and took
directional readings from several locations and plotted them on a map
and went to the
area where most of them converged. Then using the Radar Engineering
equipment went higher in frequency to located the suspected pole, that
took a
while, there are a lot of poles and lots of hardware on that street. A
school and very large apartment complex.
Now for the fix.
I was supposed to meet with the electric dept. tomorrow but they called
this afternoon 12/30 to do it. I spent about another hour making sure it
was the
suspected pole. They, the line men, were pretty cooperative but the lead
lineman was an ex Comcast employee and kept asking about mV per meter
how much
was allowed etc. I told him none (which is not technically correct but
more so then not) as they don't have a broadcast license. They hammered
the staples first
to no avail, tightened some of the hardware etc. Once their boss showed
up they were more motivated to find it with him giving directions they
finally disconnected
the lightning arrestors one at a time, on the third one the noise went
away, reconnected the noise came back. They left that one off for
replacement tomorrow and
reconnected the remaining two with no increase in noise.
Now that that the BIG noise is gone I have noticed a few others, nothing
I can't live with, and I suspect they are in very near or even in my own
house.
The city engineer let me keep the equipment, he seems in no hurry to get
it back as they only have 1-2 complaints a year so I will use it to look
for the
others.
Thanks again
73,
Rich, WD3C
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