I know this is weird, but I want to give some recognition to our local
Allegheny Power people. We're way out in the boonies at the far end of the
company's food chain. Initially their response was to put me in the hands
of one of their about-to-retire drones, who never did anything. Then the
linemen suggested I go around him to their foreman. He in turn passed me
on to a younger, gung-ho engineer and things started to happen. They
brought in their RFI guy from 2 states away (very part-time, with sketchy
equipment, but he'd at least done it before). Armed with my ID of some of
the bad poles, in two days they pretty much restored my radio environment
that had been unraveling for the last 3 years, and also solved problems for
several other local hams.
For whatever it's worth, the principal villains were a couple of what they
call "slack spans," which are used when they need to make an abrupt change
in line direction (like crossing a road) but can't guy the poles for some
reason. The old way of doing this involved metal-to-metal contact where
the insulators are attached to the pole by an eye-bolt, depending on the
weight of the slack wire to maintain electrical contact. Made to order for
RFI. Replacing these with new-style hardware caused an entire half-mile
span of power lines to go dead quiet! I still have one modest emitter
somewhere, and now I can hear the 500 KV line 2 miles to my south, but what
an improvement!
73, Pete N4ZR
Sometimes a tower is
just a tower
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