LED public street lighting...

[Looking-Glass]

Just engaged in a conversation on 6m regarding the trend within Australian local government counclls replacing bulb style street lights with LED energy efficient and brighter lighting.

All good for the general public we may say, brighter lights and saving our local council hefty energy accounts, but the interference to the humble radio enthusiast is not to be ignored.

One of the round table conversation said last month the council upgraded the corner street light to LED and since that day he has a constant strength seven noise level across the majority of the HF bands.  His house is around 80m from the said pole light.

If it's not modern home appliances generating excessive RF across the HF spectrum, now we have to deal with local government installing LED lights in order to be seen "being green" etc.

The fight goes on against man made generated RF and our hobby...

[Pigmeat]

I don't know about 6 meters, I rarely monitor it, but since our town installed LED street lights, local noise on HF and MW is much less than before.

[ThaDood]

What I hate is when those sodium vapor lights start going band and wipe out HF, lower VHF, and even seen noise into the UHF TV band, from them. I had an APT, that had one at the complex, for a couple of years going bad. DX'ing at night was damned near impossible with S+40/9 BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

[Josh]

The good thing is you can spot most of the bad lights as they have problems starting, are dim or vary in intensity, or off when they should be on. Most poles have a number tag on them so you can accurately report them to the city or whoever has charge of them. Old Timers would wack em with a sledge to see what pole was guilty.

[skeezix]

The good thing is you can spot most of the bad lights as they have problems starting, are dim or vary in intensity, or off when they should be on. Most poles have a number tag on them so you can accurately report them to the city or whoever has charge of them. Old Timers would wack em with a sledge to see what pole was guilty.

I somewhat tracked down RFI last year and called the power company. Power company sends a truck out and the guy gets his radio & confirms my suspicion. He wanders around nearby, gets in his truck, turns on his amateur radio and goes hunting. He finds the source half a block away at a pole. He starts pounding on the pole and confirms the problem is up on top. Calls another truck to come over and they proceed to replace all of the crap on top- circuit breaker, lightning arrester, and a few other things .

RFI did go down after that, but was only one source of many. And this year, there are even more sources.

They replaced our neighborhood mercury vapor lamp with one of the those LED ones. As far as I've been able to determine, there has been no change in the RFI due to that. However, they also did not reduce the charge for us paying that thing ($6.50/bimonthly) even though they claim they're less expensive.


If 47 CFR Part 15 can be ignored, why not also ignore 26 CFR Part 1?