Topband: Listening to an electric fence....

[Pete Smith]

At 04:56 PM 9/21/01 EDT, Dinsterdog@aol.com wrote:
>From what I've learned in dealing with this problem, electric fences can 
>discharge off of anything wet touching them and the ground.  The click you 
>hear is the fence discharging it's stored electricity.....the interval's 
>depend on the fence- and how fast the electric fence charge rebuilds a
charge 
>again before discharging again due to the short accross the wires-.  It will 
>be pretty darn consistant- 
>
>If it has not rained, I'd look in the swamp (gasp)  Look for a wet stick
or a 
>gooey dead snake laying accross the wires etc......

This is basically correct, but with one important refinement.  Each fence
charger has a timebase in it which sends a fresh pop of high voltage to the
fence every second or so.  If you carry around any sort of small AM radio,
you can hear a bad fence when you're close to it, and can prove it's the
source by listening while you have the owner turn it off for a minute.

The discharge to ground can be through anything conductive, such as live
grass, which is one reason why I have less trouble with noise around here
in the winter, when most of the candidate conductors are dried out.  But
there's really no substitute for walking the fence line with your machete
(or maybe a weed-whacker.  I have three problem fences around here, each
with a slightly different time-base.  Sounds like 3 drunks finger-poppin',
just slightly off-cadence. 

73, Pete N4ZR