A while back I had a loud noise problem on 20m & 17m which I tracked down to a neighbor's doorbell transformer that was going bad. Then about 7 months ago I encountered a similar extremely loud but "marching" noise that wiped out all but the 80m band with S9 + 20 noise spikes at roughly 1 second intervals. I used an MFJ-852 broadband noise receiver to track it down finally to an area of my house. Since that portion of the house was on one circuit, turning off the breaker confirmed my suspicion by ending the noise abruptly. I then proceeded to turn off everything connected to each outlet one by one. But when I finished the noise was still there. How could that be! Finally after checking all the outlets again, I found a cord going behind my couch in the family room that I assumed to go to a table lamp. It turned out to go to my spare Dewalt 24V Battery charger that I kept upstairs in the house and had forgotten about. Yep! This was the culprit. A simply battery charger created
such
interference on my attic loop antenna, as to make the bands virtually unusable.
I seem to remember reading in the recent ARRL on-line bulletin where the FCC had ruled against the neighbor of a ham who was getting similar interference from the neighbor's Snowmobile Battery Chargers. With so many devices dependent on rechargeable power cells these days, keep an eye out for these inexpensive radio-deafening contraptions.
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