Episode 7,841 Of Battling The RFI Demons

[ChrisSmolinski]

An RFI source appeared quite several months ago, as lots of rapid noise pulses, mostly on the higher end of HF. Very strong on the 11 meter (27 MHz) band. Yesterday I finally had the chance to investigate it.

I walked around the yard with a portable radio, the signal was generally weak, but then got stronger as I got closer to the house.

I checked inside, and it was strong on all the AC wiring/etc. Next I checked at the main panel, same thing, and even stronger on the coax cable for the modem & TVs.

I disconnected the incoming coax and it went away. Then I remembered this started about the time I got a new cable modem, or at least got worse at that time, when I switched to a faster modem.

This morning I checked the coax outside and noticed the wire (installed by the cable company) from the coax grounding block to the main ground rod at the power feed was very loose, barely making contact. Also it was a pretty small gauge wire. I removed it and lightly sanded where its wire clamp block attaches to the ground wire coming up off the ground rod and ran three beefy wires in parallel. The problem immediately went away.

[UncleJohn]

Huh...fahgetaboutit...