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

[Hare, Ed W1RFI]

I doubt that the foam will do all that much. First, as you point out, the noise is probaby being radiated by the wires, not the box.  Second, RF-absorber foam is usually not very effective at HF.  It may gain a few dB above 30 MHz to allow a device to pass radiated emissions tests, but on HF, it would generally be pretty useless.

If the engineers are not aware of good EMC practices, this may explain some of the reasons that some of these installations do not seem to have RFI cured when the engineers or installers install "cures."

Mike Gruber, can you pass along to the Solar Edge engineers you work with some feedback on the effectiveness or lack therof of some of the things they are trying to fix? 

-----Original Message-----
From: RFI [mailto:rfi-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Tony
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2018 3:59 PM
To: rfi at contesting.com; Gruber, Mike W1MG; Tony Brock-Fisher
Subject: [RFI] Solar Panel RFI in Kings Park - Update October 4th 2018

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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