Switching back to landline?

[Detroit47]

I live in Roseville Mi. Our landline phone provider is AT&T. The phone still worked during the great blackout of 2003. I will never give up my landline Molon labe. The infrastructure for our phone system in my neighborhood is over 60 years old and still works great.

John N8QPC

[WA2SQQ]

If its causing interference to a licensed service, isn't that illegal?

[W1RKW]

QTH here is on twisted pair copper.  I won't give it up unless an equivalent can be provided.  Cell service here stinks.  Only one room in the house on the 2nd floor can receive a signal.  Internet service here is ATT/Frontier ADSL without any issues over the last 10 years.  Initially ADSL did not work well with the receivers.  The fix was to put the PS and modem into an RF cage and ground the cage to the electrical ground and problem goes away.  Works like a charm, squeaky clean quiet.

[N0WVA]

Try wrapping the modem in aluminum foil and ground it somewhere, preferably on the back of the device. Try the threads on the coax connector. If this works, then remove the foil and use a screen as the digital crap gets so hot it destroys itself. Worked for me. 

[Opcom]

If its causing interference to a licensed service, isn't that illegal?

Sure, but I think the remedy in the law is to discontinue its use, not redesign it for reduced emissions. The same applies to doorbells, TVs, computers, and the rest of it. The onus is not on the manufacturer or the owner (telco) but on the user of the noisy gear, so the customer is stuck with the no-win choice and the encumbrance, and paying for it. In the contract is probably a paragraph stating the subject equipment is not guaranteed for fitness for any purpose, etc etc. so the contract can't be in breach by the provider due to their noisy gear therefore penalties apply one the trap is sprung.

In the early 2000s I ran a big VAX on 220V at home. It made a lot of electrical noise and somewhere in DEC or the included FCC documentation I came to believe there is a noise level for gear intended to be used in the home and a higher level or some exemption for that to be used in business locations (computer room in this case). It said this is not for use in a residence due to emissions, or something, I do not recall that long ago.

BTW this 6000 series model was very popular/numerous and the blower there is huge and quiet and fairly easy to find. It is 24V for full blast but runs on 12V more slowly and quire silently. There are two in each computer. It's designed for vertical mounting but I have put a few hundred hours on one face down on top of the cabinet to suck the heat out of the big rig here. On full blast of course  

[N2DTS]

I work for Verizon, but not the copper phone line part, the old MCI that Verizon bought.
They want copper to die, they no longer put covers back on, or put air on the cables to keep the water out.
They want to be in the wireless business and want to get rid of all the other regulated stuff.

The last storm around here, the power was off for 3 days, and nothing worked, the entire cell network was down in South Jersey.
No home phone, no power, no cell service.
This is the way its going.

Even more interesting is the company has out sourced almost everything to Manila and some to India.
They have a lot of control and access, even to government stuff.

Since the FCC ruled they can not slow down or stop access to other things like netflix, they no longer want to be in the content provider business, just the internet access business, since young people download stuff off the internet to watch.

Fios is expensive to build and connect to peoples houses, I have heard $700.00 per customer plus $750.00 in house work to hook each customer up.
They no longer really want to be in that business, wireless has huge profits and little infrastructure.

Things are really changing.
When the power goes out, ham radio may be the ONLY way to communicate at all.

[W3GMS]

If its causing interference to a licensed service, isn't that illegal?

In the early 2000s I ran a big VAX on 220V at home. It made a lot of electrical noise and somewhere in DEC or the included FCC documentation I came to believe there is a noise level for gear intended to be used in the home and a higher level or some exemption for that to be used in business locations (computer room in this case). It said this is not for use in a residence due to emissions, or something, I do not recall that long ago.

Your right about devices going into a residential home environment having tougher EMI standards.  Any marketed device with a switching frequency greater than 9 kHz has to either pass FCC Class B or Class A emission requirements.  The testing performed looks at both the conducted (what coming out of the line cord) and radiated emissions.   Class B outlines allowable levels for residential application whereas Class A outlines the levels for non residential type of products.   The thinking is, in a residential enviroment you have other devices in close proximity to the radiated source so the emission levels from that source need to be lower.    More details can be found in the document I have attached.  In particular see page 3 which talks about the differences.   

https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet62/oet62rev.pdf

Joe-GMS   

[Jim/WA2MER]

Standards are nice, but they don't always help you. Part 15 standards (or any standards, for that matter) have to be viewed in terms of practicality and recourse. First, the tougher standards for residential equipment are geared toward electronics that is commonly found in the home, like television receivers, cordless phones and audio systems. As we are painfully aware, our radio communications equipment is orders of magnitude more sensitive and therefore more susceptible to interference.

Part 15 states that certified devices must accept interference and cannot cause interference. WA2SQQ nailed it: the burden of eliminating interference that may be caused falls on the operator of the interfering device, not on the supplier or manufacturer. If the device is operating within the applicable standards, then the supplier and manufacturer are off the hook and you have no recourse with them.

[W1RKW]

my guess it is the SMPS that's causing you grief. Surround your modem/switch with an RF cage and ground the cage. Allow for some ventilation by drilling vent holes. Wouldn't hurt to put some beads on the wiring but probably not necessary.

[steve_qix]

At Rattlesnake Island I have a fairly extensive network infrastructure, and the antennas are close to the the wires and the cottages so there's plenty of coupling!

When I first built this setup, there was an  S9 "hiss" in the background on 75 meters.  Normally the background was near 0.  So, pretty strong.  When I transmitted, the DSL line would lose synch.  We have a DSL line here (1.5 megabits) as well as a connection to the mainland using 2.4gHz with good, long range equipment at each end.

There were problems with RFI coming from what seemed like everything that was hooked up!

I ended running EVERY line in and out of any device and/or in and out of EVERY power supply through cores with as many turns as possible.  I didn't necessarily use type 43.  In fact, the best filters here are made of some pretty high perm material that I use for pulse transformers in off-line PWM modulators.

Anyway, all this to say the power supplies are part of the problem and the devices themselves are the other half.  It really is possible to quiet things down but it does take a lot of cores.  I probably have 20 [pretty big - like 3 inchers] cores total here, just dedicated to filtering network and phone devices.

Good luck with it!  The problem is solvable.

[ka1tdq]

I have these running next to my backyard.  You can see one leg of the 40 meter delta in the picture.  My 75 meters is wiped out also by S9 noise, and I attribute it to the power lines.  40 meters is fine though.

Jon
KA1TDQ

[W3RSW]

As a thought experiment only and not to be realized in this brane for a myriad of reasons:

Everyone of those towers is grounded.
A wire in quarter wave increments of your favorite freq., incorporating velocity factor, say at 3885 out to the base of one might be interesting.

[ka1tdq]

Ah, yes. A total east-west strap!

Jon

[steve_qix]

This inspired me to eliminate the remainder of the noise generated by digital devices at Rattlesnake Island.  I still had to contend with an S-5 constant background hiss/hash.

I ended up filtering the ethernet cables to 2 devices; the power supply outputs of several others and the power supply lines to everything.  Now the noise doesn't move the S meter.  The filters are random windings of whatever cable needs to be quieted down, through fairly high perm torroids.

Worked great!  It's nice to have the quiet background back again.  I've been lazy for a couple of years about fixing this problem.  Now it's done !