D. Peter Maus wrote:
On 10/20/09 12:35 , Bill Baka wrote:
The sun is going through a weird sunspot cycle right now and skip should
be pretty good even during the day. 20 years ago I had a big outside
whip and managed to talk to a guy in Jamaica who was really surprised to
be talking to someone from California. If 2x5 watt ERP radios can do
that the stations still on the air should come in strong.
I give this about 2 posts before someone goes off topic.


Depending on your frequency of choice, you should be able to work that
kind of distance with less than that power. I worked a guy in North
Carolina from Chicago on 1 watt about 20 years ago, on 11 meters.
Conditions, time of day all work for or against you.

But 10 and 11 meters can be amazing QRP bands.

I don't think I could have done that much better except on a narrow band
Morse code, and when have you ever seen Morse code and CB? Either way,
the guy in Jamaica and I were pretty blown away.



Second, I have to mention that those el-cheapo CFL's that Wal-mart is
selling have one hell of an RFI output. I thought my radio had gone down
when I thought to turn off all the CFL's in my house and it got
listen-able. I have an oscilloscope monitoring the audio and the noise
spikes are at 60 Hz and very consistent.


I've noticed some, but not a LOT of noise from CFL's here. Although,
when the noise floor rises, I'm thinking it's from one of the neighbors'
CFL's. My own are pretty quiet.

I had some very noisy ones and tossed them so now my house is quiet but
the neighbors use them for night lights and CFL's have destroyed my
noise floor. I can still get some of the channels broadcasting in
English but if I am using the crystal filter I can't make out a woman's
voice.

I bought mine in bulk from HeartlandAmerica.com.

I have bought from Heartland and their stuff is pretty good. 90% is made
in China so I'm not going to kid myself on that one. They seem to always
have good deals.

The brand is
Green/Shine, made in China and the cost was a little less than $2/ea in
a variety of wattages and lumen outputs. Fairly quiet. Two in the
bathroom downstairs create enough noise that I can't use a radio there,
but they don't seem to radiate enough to get into radios elsewhere in
the building.

The obvious solution, to me, would be for the F.C.C. to get off their
HDTV campaign to force us all to buy Chinese flat screens and do their
jobs regarding 'noise pollution'.

But the simple solution is an antenna in a quiet part of the property,
well grounded with a well grounded transmission line.


Not enough property at this house so I climbed a few trees and ran the
wire for the antenna through them. Total Rube Goldberg but it works.

I think that if someone wanted to get into their radio it would be a
small matter to put a line synced blank pulse when needed.

Interesting thought. I've had some pretty decent results with some
noise blankers, depending on the receiver. But a blank pulse, not tried
that.

I'll give that a look.


I was hoping not to be the token inventor here but the noise pulse shows
up on my scope (4 channel x 100MHz Tektronix) and if I just had a
reference to the 60 cycle I could set up a few one shots to cut the
beginning to the other end of the noise pulse. Kind of a notch filter
for noise, not adjacent channel. Traditional noise blankers have to see
the beginning of the pulse and guesstimate the end of the pulse so some
noise does get through.


Anyone?
No politics.


You're no fun.

I'm not going to get sucked into those splatter posted topics if at all
possible. Too much time wasted.
Cheers, my Hammarlund is calling me.
Bill Baka