Donald Chester wrote:
> I recently noticed a very rough, broad signal that wipes out 30-kHz
> portions of the spectrum from the middle of the broadcast
> band through 10 m. It is especially bad on 160 and 80m. I did a little
> sniffing with a portable radio and found the source to be a
> table lamp my daughter just bought. The thing doesn't have a
> conventional switch, but a metal base, and you turn in on and off
> by touching the base with your hand. The thing must have some sort of
> oscillator somewhere in the 450 kHz range, and works by
> detuning the oscillator when you touch it. What kind of rubbish is
> someone going to think of next to garbage up the radio
> spectrum!
I was given one of these some years ago, and took it to our "place in the
hills"
where I don't usually operate. Up there, we have a cordless phone: whenever
the phone rang, the thing would turn on and off!
Then, last year, I took the HF rig up there and worked on 160 over Christmas.
I found the thing gave off a little QRM, but before I got round to tackling it,
I found it switched on and off at every dot or dash... Wife thought it was
having a fit.
Anyway, the switching gave up with a muffled PHUT! a few minutes later, and was
removed and replaced by a standard switch in the lead. Everyone's happier.
--
Keith Jillings
G3OIT GW3OIT G-UTSY at EGMC
|