Topband: 160m Noise Floor

[Robert Harmon]

Hi Brian, 

I feel your pain!
Top band is a tough one for noise.  I also live in a California suburban neighborhood.  Our power lines are not underground like a lot of the newer areas and have been pretty noisy.  Gradually 
I have been successful at working with our California electric company, PG&E to fix most of the noise coming from the power lines and street lights.  Living in California 
you may have dealt with them before on RFI issues.  It is a slow process but you can get results if you are patient and live long enough hi,hi. What I have found that works the best is to do the
 tracking and pinpoint the noise source for them before calling them out.  Then you can take them over to the culprit and point it out.    
My suggestion, and maybe you have already done this is to insure that some or all of the noise isn't generated from your own home.  What I would do is temporarily run your HF rig 
off of battery power in the shack and then shut off all electrical feed to the house at the service entrance.  Then you know that the noise, if it remained, is external to your home.  
This is the first check that PG&E will do when responding to an RFI trouble ticket, by the way.  They shut off power to the home and see if the noise remains.  If it goes away then they will not 
pursue any further, the noise is generated in your home not from their power lines.   I would do this test first and based upon the results you can track further.  I would be happy to 
share some tracking techniques I have used if you are interested.  
There are receive antennas that you can make that will help to reduce the noise and external noise phasing boxes 
that try to null out the noise but I would first work at eliminating the noise at its source.

73,
Bob
K6UJ

On Sep 1, 2010, at 10:29 AM, kd6nrp at earthlink.net wrote:

> Good Morning:
> 
> My QTH is in a suburban neighborhood surrounded by other houses. Manmade noise sources in the area are producing a receive noise floor of S-9 across the entire 160m band.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reduce the noise?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Brian, KD6NRP
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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