Topband: Wind Farming

[Brian Miller]

Thanks Frank

I was previously the chair of the Quartz Hill User Group responsible for the ZL6QH station.

We undertook measurements of the noise from the wind farm at the ZL6QH site. A report on our measurements is published at http://www.zl6qh.com/rf-noise-measurements-quartz-hill-2009-v3.pdf .

The ZL6QH wind farm used Siemens 2.3 MW variable speed turbines. We  believe the noise was generated by the water cooled electronic power converter technology that was used to convert the variable output of each turbine to the fixed voltage and frequency of the national grid.

Our observations suggested that a HF contest station would have be located at least several km from a wind farm using these turbines to reduce the interference to an acceptable level on the low frequency bands.

But not all turbines are this noisy. We also conducted some HF radio frequency noise measurements at the Meridian Energy Te Apiti wind farm (near Palmerston North) in October 2005 but found no evidence of any significant noise being radiated by the turbines, even at locations within 100 metres of the nearest turbines. Unlike the turbines at Quartz Hill, the Te Apiti turbines were a fixed speed design and did not use a separate power converter unit

73

Brian VK3MI ZL1AZE

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Message: 7
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2016 15:59:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: donovanf at starpower.net
To: TopBand List <topband at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: Topband: Wind Farming
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<990159030.6273859.1459367974629.JavaMail.root at starpower.net>
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The Quartz Hill Contesters -- once very well known as ZL6QH -- 
were forced to shut down their spectacular contesting location 
by the RFI from a wind farm installed in the same location as 
their contest station. 


http://zl6qh.com/logs/Quartz%20Hill%20Pictures%20-%20%20March%202010.pdf 


73 
Frank 
W3LPL