[RFI] Solar Panel RFI in Kings Park - Update October 4th 2018

[Tony Brock-Fisher]

/'They determined the noise to be one and the same'. /

This is a HUGE win. Now you have them concentrated on fixing the 
offending location, instead of spending their time spinning their 
wheels, looking for other causes!

I agree, the idea of 'RF absorbing foam' sounds like snake oil. But if 
you got them to put large solid chokes on, then let them go on thinking 
the RF foam fixed it...

Also, improving the ground system  may not help and may actually hurt, 
if they increase the coupling of noise into the ground. It is important 
that the ground rails do not provide a 'sneak path' around any ferrites 
installed on cables with ground, such as at the connection from the roof 
to the home run. Specifically, in figure 3 of my article, you must make 
sure that the bare ground conductor passing thru the chokes does not 
make accidental contact to the rails before it has exited the last choke 
in the string (the left hand one in figure 3).

-Tony, K1KP


On 10/6/2018 4:04 PM, Tom Thompson wrote:
> It won't.  If you put a transmitter inside a screen room with an 
> external antenna, it will radiate.
>
> Tom   W0IVJ
>
> On 10/6/2018 1:59 PM, Tony wrote:
>> All:
>>
>> The RF Engineers from Solar Edger came out to my home this week to 
>> assess the noise emanating from my neighbors solar panel system.
>>
>> They plugged into my antennas to view the spectral noise on my 
>> receiver which they then compared to the spectral noise that appeared 
>> on their portable setup near the solar panels. They determined the 
>> noise to be one and the same.
>>
>> The next course of action is to improve the ground system and install 
>> RF absorbing foam to each optimizer. I also convinced them to replace 
>> the snap-on ferrites located at each optimizer, with larger ones so 
>> they can loop several turns of cable around each core.
>>
>> They originally said they would just go with the RF foam which is 
>> puzzling: I don't understand how encasing a noisy device with this 
>> stuff could suppress RFI when the device is attached to long runs of 
>> cable that act like antennas. Can anyone explain how that would work?
>>
>> Tony -K2MO
>>
>>
>>
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>