[CQ-Contest] long-delayed noise echo?

[Woods, Eric D edwoods]

Hi all:

Some of you probably know that my job in Pacific Bell allows me to come 
across the strangest things.  Like horses that won't go near pole mounted 
repeater cases (ultra sonic whistling from air pressure leak),
evaluation of Ground Penetrating Radar at a graveyard or even reports from 
our corporate offices that their telephone instruments were emitting 3 loud 
beeps and causing blood-shot eyeballs and headaches.

I get stuck evaluating all kinds of different noise phenomena.

For the past 6 months or so, I have been following the troubles of a local 
ham who has been complaining about high power-utility caused noise which had 
essentially shut his hf operation down.  He is a rag-chewer and sometimes 
dxer.

He has a very nice Force 12 20-10M yagi (including WARC) mounted at about 
60' of military surplus aluminum tower (resembling Rohn 25).  This tower 
does not have bolted together sections.  The sections are held together with 
what resembles "hood-pins".  You know, what holds the hood down on Racecars 
and hotrods.  But I digress.

His radio is a TS-830 and he uses a home brew amp - pair of 813's.  The 
station is fairly well put together and is grounded fairly well.

The problem he has is this:

He will pick out a clear 20M phone freq. like 14.193 .  There is no power 
line noise present at the time.  He will transmit several dits and lo!,  his 
clear freq. was full of power utility hash!!  The bandwidth of the noise was 
about 20 Khz or so.  He moved freq. and did it again.  Amazing!!!

The power company eventually replaced a lightning arrestor and the ham 
rewired one of his neighbor's attics (the ham is a licensed electrian).

My problem is:  What can store frequency information and transmit noise that 
lasts several seconds after the transmitter is keyed?  My original thought 
is that someone had a spectrum analyzer controlled by a GPIB controller 
which also controlled a noise transmitter that is capable of changing center 
freq's.

Or moon-bounce noise.

Can a transmitted signal cause a dielectric breakdown of a power circuit's 
compontent(s) that will last for that duration?  Is it Hale - Bopp?

Time to touch my retirement package and look at a KH8 qsl card.

Eric, K6GV
edwoods at pacbell.com

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