In article .com,
Paladin wrote:

Recently....NO MATTER where I position the mag. on the cover, I GET
a small signal that
"CAN'T" be squalched away !!! It's just white noise/static !!! IF I
move my handie-talike to around the same area(with-in 10-12 ft.) IT
ALSO reacts the same way !! WHAT COULD BE causing this PHENOM ???

I've seen 2-meter spectrum noise from:

- Cable-TV leakage - worst is around 145.250, apparently due to the
video carrier leakage on Cable Channel 18.

- Multiple spurs generated by a switching power-supply regulator in
a Netgear wireless access point / IP router. The spurs were
apparently being radiated directly from the PC board, out through
the case - the power supply lead was adequately choked but this
didn't stop direct radiation. Other models of router (including
one from the same manufacturer) did not exhibit the problem.

- Noise radiated from telephone lines which have DSL networking
service enabled. Although the DSL signal is supposed to fall
entirely within the HF range, I believe that it has significant
harmonics up into the VHF which are not filtered out by the DSL
modems.

- Harmonic noise generated by a defective oscillator in an Ethernet
hub. This one was a doozie - it drifted through the 2-meter band
as temperature changed, and it caused horrendous squelch-tail
buzzing on several repeaters miles away when it drifted through
their input frequencies. Apparently it was radiating out through
the owner's Ethernet cables, and also getting back into the
building wiring through the power cord.

A device doesn't have to be complex to cause VHF QRM! Although it
didn't actually cause QRM, I did find another source of possible
interference recently when I tested and repaired a little two-tone
audio oscillator another ham had given me. It was a simple
battery-powered two-transistor oscillator based on a 1970s article in
QST. Due to its design (two simple twin-T oscillators using 2N2222
transistors) it was prone to break into a parasitic oscillation at one
point in the audio curve... it was putting out a nice 1 kHz audio
sinewave, with a VHF parasitic around 20 dB lower in amplitude,
wandering around from 130 to 160 MHz. One ferrite bead on the base
lead of each of the two transistors completely cured the problem.

Other people have reported nasty-noisy signals from oscillations in
TV-antenna preamplifiers... these have caused interference to 2-meter
ham operators, aviation band, and even to GPS (see the page at
http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/art...l.jsp?id=43404
for a summary).

Can't figure this one
out.....any ideas what to do ??? please...

Do the "turn off and unplug" bit again, but go even further. For
starters, try turning off the main breaker for your whole
house/apartment. This will be a very clear way of telling you whether
the noise source is internal or external.

If it's internal to your home, turn the breaker back on and then start
unplugging every single device in the house (no matter how apparently
harmless) one at a time until the QRM goes away.

If it's external, go hunting. Get yourself a 2-meter directional beam
antenna (or make one - Google for "tape measure Yagi") and start
DF'ing.

If you track it to a neighbor's house, introduce yourself politely and
explain the problem and try to enlist their cooperation in finding the
source of the emission.

See if you can find someone in your area who has an RF spectrum
analyzer good up to 150 MHz or so. It can be very instructive to look
at the whole 2-meter band, and see whether you're seeing a single
carrier, broadband noise, or multiple narrowband spurs. A spectrum
analyzer, hooked to a portable Yagi via a 20' coax, makes a *very*
nice "characterize and locate" tool.

When I helped my city's RACES EC locate the source of some nasty
2-meter RFI which was desquelching his radios and interfering with his
ability to receive simplex, it took about 10 minutes with an
analyzer-and-Yagi combination for me to be able to say "Well, it's
your next-door neighbor's condo, upstairs, in the back, polarized at
around 45 degrees from the vertical. and is multiple spurs at about
50 kHz separation."

The bad news is that on many 2-meter frequencies, there's so much hash
and garbage in urban areas that it's necessary in practice to turn on
a receiver's tone-squelch, and force the receiver to remain muted
until it hear's a repeaters output CTCSS tone. If your repeater
doesn't put tone on its output, then this won't work, alas.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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