The AM Forum

I’ve been away from the shack for the last couple months, work, life, kids, etc.  My station has too much noise.  So much that it’s not fun. A quiet day on 40m is S5. A normal day is S7-9. A noisy day is S9+20. It’s worse on 80m…I literally cannot hear that Chinese or Russian radar thing over the local noise.

I’m on vacation on Beaver Island, in the middle of Lake Michigan. Last evening I strung 30’ of wire from one end of a picnic table to a branch I could reach in a tree.  Using the FT991A, noise on 40m was S0-1. Easy copy of the end of a QSO on 7290 at S5, I think one call was W9WOO, but I’m not sure. I didn’t throw out a call as the band was fading as the sun set.  It’s raining today but I’ll be back out there tomorrow afternoon and the rest of the week.

I need to move out of town, it seems….

Ed

Tracking down and going to the trouble of eliminating the sources of RF noise might be less work and a lot cheaper than moving.

First, clean house with a portable RX search.

Even those by others like power lines and switching supplies can be fixed with diplomacy or making the FCC aware.

73DG

Years ago I used to be able to “clean house” with a sniffer or by selectively opening breakers, getting noise down to S1-2 (or S3 with my main computer on). That’s no longer the case; main breaker off and the radios on battery give the same huge noise levels.  One neighbor runs a pot growing operation, the street department replaced all the lights with LED, and the only time it’s quiet is during a power failure.

We want to move anyway. It’s just more incentive….

Ed

Well, in that case...

73DG