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Author Topic: I can’t hear anything  (Read 376 times)

K6BRN

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Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #15 on: September 09, 2022, 04:09:05 PM »

Hi Neal:

S9 noise?  Wow.  That IS high. 

You might try adding a hefty Common Mode Choke (CMC) to reduce noise that's coupling onto the coax shield, in place of an entrance ground, which I'm pretty sure you do not have.  In addition, make sure any RX preamps on your transceiver are off and that RX filtering is narrowed to 3 KHz or less, preferably with a roofing filter.  Both of these measures can help.

You may not be an advocate of FT8, but if you can arrange FT8 capability, then it should still be able to operate in your noise environment.  SSB is probably a no-go, though a CLRdsp unit from West Mountain radio can work wonders.  CW may be workable, using very narrow filtering to reduce noise bandwidth.

I understand your living arrangement.  Really tough to keep things "under the radar" and very limited options.

Brian - K6BRN
« Last Edit: September 09, 2022, 04:11:33 PM by K6BRN »
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G8FXC

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  • Posts: 533
Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #16 on: September 10, 2022, 03:25:49 AM »

Hi Neal:

S9 noise?  Wow.  That IS high. 

...

Brian - K6BRN

I often have S9 noise on my dipole on 40 and 80, but this is solved by my small RX loop which is attached to the back fence of my garden a couple of feet above the ground. It's about 1m diameter and fed with a low-noise preamplifier at the base. With a combination of the preamp and some additional gain switched on in the radio, the strength of genuine signals is almost the same as on the dipole, but the noise floor is five or six S-points lower.

Martin (G8FXC)
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K0XS

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  • Posts: 17
Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #17 on: September 10, 2022, 05:17:06 AM »

Hi Neal:

S9 noise?  Wow.  That IS high. 

You might try adding a hefty Common Mode Choke (CMC) to reduce noise that's coupling onto the coax shield, in place of an entrance ground, which I'm pretty sure you do not have.  In addition, make sure any RX preamps on your transceiver are off and that RX filtering is narrowed to 3 KHz or less, preferably with a roofing filter.  Both of these measures can help.

You may not be an advocate of FT8, but if you can arrange FT8 capability, then it should still be able to operate in your noise environment.  SSB is probably a no-go, though a CLRdsp unit from West Mountain radio can work wonders.  CW may be workable, using very narrow filtering to reduce noise bandwidth.

I understand your living arrangement.  Really tough to keep things "under the radar" and very limited options.

Brian - K6BRN

I started using WSJT-X Four years ago when things started getting bad.  As you can see they've only gotten worse.

MFJ-915's installed around that time.

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AB6RF

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Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #18 on: September 10, 2022, 07:31:22 PM »

So have you done any debugging?
Or are you just complaining here, and trying random things?
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AC2EU

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    • McVey Electronics
Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #19 on: September 11, 2022, 08:44:55 AM »

So have you done any debugging?
Or are you just complaining here, and trying random things?

I wonder that myself. He apparently doesn't want to search for the noise source(s),but just trying 'band aid solutions" that aren't working.
If he started the search for noisy devices when he posted, he would have come to some kind of conclusion by now!

AI5BC

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Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #20 on: September 11, 2022, 09:11:03 AM »


I just cannot even begin to think of the problems associated with shutting everything down and attempting to bring things up one at a time then resetting it all.

I’m at a loss as to where to go from here.

Your call sign says you are a fossil. Time to hang it up and move on to less challenging activities like taking naps. Turning off breakers and critical thinking is just too much stress on you. Either that or you forgot how to change your hearing aid battery.
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N9KSQ

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Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #21 on: October 09, 2022, 10:52:24 AM »

I feel your pain, I'm in very much the same boat. Using breakers I determined the two rooms responsible for taking my noise floor from s3 to s9++ are the living room and my office, but beyond that there was no single obvious culprit. Everything is contributing.

I'd unplugged and/or put ferrites on almost everything, and finally determined that four Meross smart plugs drop the floor by 3 s units when unplugged, but we've gotten addicted to them so I'm trying to find quiet replacements.

In the mean time it's digital modes or taking everything somewhere else. I'm starting to think might be cheaper to buy a KX2 and go to park 8-)
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N6YWU

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Re: I can’t hear anything
« Reply #22 on: October 10, 2022, 06:14:40 PM »

I just cannot even begin to think of the problems associated with shutting everything down and attempting to bring things up one at a time then resetting it all.

Be glad you have a choice.  In my neighborhood, power from the local utility has gone down 3 times this year, due to blown transformers and such.  A couple years previous, the power utility purposely shut down power nearly city wide due to fear of fires in high winds.

Each time I grabbed a battery, plugged in my radio, and found the RF noise floor had dropped significantly.  Used to be down to S0, until a few more nearby houses added solar panels.  Now the noise only drops a couple S units.

I kill the main breaker, and all the room breakers, until after utility power comes back on line.  (This could potential avoid damage from possible utility start-up surges.)  When power was again available, I could flip the household breakers back on one at a time to hunt down my RF noise makers.  (Mostly networking cables, as expected.)

But powering the whole house back up is much easier than in the old days.  Used to be that I would have to reset thermostats, VCRs, answering machines, outdoor lights, about a dozen clocks, and other stuff that I can't remember.  Now all the newer stuff resets itself, except for the clocks on 2 older appliances, and a Raspberry Pi server where I manually restart some of the SDR services that I haven't fully configured.
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