[TowerTalk] FOUND THE NOISE PROBLEM

Tue Jan 26 15:48:38 PST 2010

A  little over a year ago, my new neighbor put up a nice flagpole in his front yard, with some low-voltage spotlights controlled by a LV power supply with a photocell. Every evening, about sunset, 80 and 160 meters suddenly had a terrible noise level - I could even drive by his house listening to the AM broadcast band in the car and hear the racket. 

I took my portable FT-817 HF transceiver out with me while walking around, and found that the noise was indeed coming from his place. Once I found out exactly where all the noise was coming from, I took my AM portable radio over and showed the neighbor. and I covered/uncovered the photocell, turning on and off the noise along with the flagpole spotlights. When he saw what was happening, he told me to go ahead and unplug the supply completely (feeding the spotlights), and agreed to bury the LV wire instead of leaving it lying on the ground from the supply to the lights.

Some of these LV supplies can make a huge amount of noise! Same with my laptop PC supply - I have to unplug the supply and run on batteries only, if I want to work 160/80/40 Meters while it's on. I've tried toroids on the supply line (input and output) and the phone line - no help at all. I hope that DXpeditions try their logging PCs and networks thoroughly before leaving on a big trip, otherwise, they may be logging by hand and manually entering the contacts into the PC log later, when they find out the PCs keep them from hearing weak signals.

The noise I was picking up was on both an 80-Meter dipole, and a multiband vertical, several hundred feet from the noisy flagpole spotlights.

LJ

-----Original Message-----
>From: anthony <k2vi at cox.net>
>Sent: Jan 26, 2010 3:05 PM
>To: towertalk at contesting.com
>Subject: [TowerTalk] FOUND THE NOISE PROBLEM
>
>Gene mentioned the ouside light. The light is a motion sensor type. When I turned the inside switch off the noise disappeared. YAAAY!! Thanks to everyone who helped me on this one. You guys are A#1. now I need to go to lowes and purchase a new non sensor type light. The sensor is great when you walk up to the door at night but my SW dxing takes presidence. 73s
>
>tony k2vi
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