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Post by jimhenry2000 on Aug 5, 2017 0:58:38 GMT
I should mention that I have received two responses from the FCC since I filed my RFI noise complaint last night.
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Post by Boomer on Aug 5, 2017 1:38:06 GMT
Angry Birds
Yes, those birds might rise up and be our overtakers, just like in the song Supernature, a haunting tune from the past that left its mark on me as a heavy thought.
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Post by thelegacy on Aug 5, 2017 16:26:47 GMT
Boomer that Beep Beep eep you mention I have heard when I'm riding in the car and my wife is on the road near any power line. While testing my transmitter on 87.7 Mhz I had the Radio on 87.7 Mhz while on the way from Saluda to Deltaville to see where my station started to come in. While a car passed playing Deth Metal near Stampers Bay Road I even heard the beep beep on that road while passing the power lines.
I assume that it is some form of data communication across the line as I know what the cable company's birdie frequency sounds like. The cable company has theirs around 102.7 or somewhere I can't remember it. I did receive this on portable Radio's while walking in my complex and in the car and lately its quite clear so I need to report this to Metrocast to get that leak fixed.
In Lansing, Michigan Broadstripe use to have those pay TV jamming signals which blocked Flix, Showtime, The Movie Channel. I'd get Flix's which was cable channel 14 around the 2 meter Ham band. This is how I'd check the neighborhood for leaks.
I'd annoy Broadstripe (formally Millennium Digital Media) about the issue and told them that most of their signals were leaking outside of the cable lines and showed them with a pollice scanner how I could sit outside and listen to Flix and Showtime and told them "Why pay for cable when you can sit outside with a Walkman TV and watch for FREE?" That finally got them to do something about the interference they were causing. Talk money out of their pockets and they'll fix the issue.
This power company issue all over the FM band I don't know how to fix without drawing unwanted attention.
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Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2017 17:41:00 GMT
Speaking of RFI/EMI from consumer devices, I recently bought the Real Cheap RTL-SDR radio.
I was somewhat disappointed at first as I couldn't get it to tune below 30 mHz.
When I figured that out the next disappointment was all the noise. Every few kHz from 100 kHz up to 30 mHz was an obnoxious buzzing.
When the light bulb came on I remembered I installed LED tube lights in place of regular fluorescent tubes.
When the LED lights went off-bliss. All that noise was gone and I went to my happy place.
So I guess for serious listening I'll use the 40 watt incandescent desk lamp.
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Post by thelegacy on Aug 6, 2017 19:07:40 GMT
Our house had all the bulbs replaced by those energy saving lights because the landlord gets a grant from the government for using energy saving steps. I know some of those florescent bulbs can really wipe out Radio. I do hear some hash from that inside the house. However nowhere as bad as I experienced in Elizabeth City, NC on North Road Street across the street from the Pasquotank library. There was a traffic light right to the left of the house as I walked outside my front door as you can Google 211 North Road Street, Elizabeth City, NC and see for yourself why I had so much issues with that. To the right was a Radio tower which use to be Century Link where you could turn in your modems and buy stuff from them. When I called them they told me they don't use that Radio tower anymore, but I'm thinking someone else is.
AM Radio sometimes was a challenge when the noise floor was high from the sound of rugh rugh rugh from what I thought was AC noise but I did walk to the right of the front door of the house and walked with my Grundig 450 DLX Radio to the building past that house on the right. When I got to the side of that house the noise was super strong. This explains why I had issues with my Talking House TX which otherwise would have been a prime area for a part 15 AM station or even carrier current station in that area. But you walked to the library to the right of my house as you walk to the front door and the signal starts to get covered by the noise. One day however it made it almost to the Shop And Go in the Car Radio.
500 mW on FM living there got me to the Shop And Go which you would drive to the right of the house and travel right before you saw Quality Seafood or CVS and the signal faded on 96.3 Mhz a blank frequency while living there. Folks at the library while working at the counter would listen to my station right across the street and so did the lawyer two buildings down where I walked to the building.
The moral is however that even FM those traffic lights to the left of my door as I walked outside of my house messed up FM with the buzzing sound and I'd hear what sounded like modem data all across the FM band (especially towards the upper half of the band). The bleed over from that Christian station on 88.3 Mhz was also a challenge worse than the Rap station on 96.7 Mhz which really came in loud. The engineer of that station did get back to me on that one even though he k new I was running a 500 mW station he saw no issue with because my signal faded long before it would even think of any mixing. It did however nix a few feet from my door but the mix faded before the library as he had passed my house several times and advised me that I should not go any higher than 500 mW for that reason. This was when the TX didn't malfunction.
The bleed did subside a bit after I talked to him about the issue and it turns out he liked my station hearing it the short range he did. But after a while my TX started to be durty and I shut down after he did verify for me that for some reason it was throwing a loud Buzz Buzz across the FM band all the way to the library (Ouch). That TX has now faced the grave yard cuz it could not be solved.
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Post by Boomer on Aug 6, 2017 20:31:33 GMT
It can be fun or nerve wracking to track down noise sources, and being on AM I'm in the trenches with it regularly. I've had various noises on FM for years too, like fan noise at 108 MegaCycles, where it sounds like someone is running a fan into a mic, I really did think that's what it was when I heard it long ago! I've heard other tones at times that I thought were pagers, or telemetry, but usually the FM band is pretty clear of weirdness compared to AM. There's always something happening on AM with unexplained noises, hum, hash, beeps, pulses, tone patterns. It's interesting listening in itself, though I'm usually trying to hear a radio station's AM signal. I added 30 seconds of the main beeping noise I'm hearing these days. It's on a lot, but not all the time, about 20 khz wide signal centered at about 1110 AM, and asymmetrical around the frequency, the lower side tunes into a sort of phasey hash noise, and tuning up it drops off fast. When I first started to hear it a year and a half ago, with the regular pattern of beeps and lack of them, like mark-space, it seemed to be some kind of low speed code. It's pretty strong too, dominant, I get it outside along the street, and for a bit in the back yard, maybe 50 feet. I've had to deal with lighting as well. At first I liked compact fluorescent bulbs, and started with older generation ones with bigger and heavier bases. I didn't notice much of a problem, then a friend brought a bunch of bulbs over and I put them in across the house and had high noise on the radio, so I went back to mostly filamentary bulbs. I found that CFLs were all over the place as far as noise, some noisier than others by a long shot. I just use an AM radio to test different ones in a desk lamp and see how far I can pull the radio away and still hear the noise from the bulb. I never cared too much for CFL for a few reasons, like starting at lower brightness, can't have that on a stairwell light when you want to run down, the noise, the more toxic materials. I really like LEDs though, I've watched them grow from tiny weak dark red pinpoints used as indicators, made by Monsanto, to white LED chips putting out actual lumens at high efficiency, and once the leap to lumens, I felt the end of older kinds of lighting. I've tried multiple brands, and some of their ballasts are noisy like CFL, but I found a better type, with strips of LEDs in the pattern of a filament. In my lamp test they had noise just a few inches away from the bulb, not a few feet like some CFLs had. The bulb shown is European, but they have Edison based ones for North America. I looked down into the base through the bulb and could see a few surface mount parts, then read about them, and they're high voltage strings of LEDs, and the 'ballast' is just composed of a capacitor and surge resistor! That means no diode junction to snap on and off, no switcher supply, getting rid of a source of switching noise. Hope you track your noise down, Legacy, sounds like a big problem. Boomer |
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