Tuesday 29 December 2015

RE: Moving

Since i moved the shack up into my spare room i have been having a clear our and sold quite a few of my radios.... only to buy more radio. my shack now consists of a Icom IC-9100 for 2m 70cms and a IC-7600 for HF and 6m, i have also decided to move my test gear into the shack as it was too cold to leave it in my out house workshop.


Light At The End Of The LEDS

Well as i posted earlier about my noise problem i have been in contact with greenworldsolutionsledlighting from ebay, Ken has been very helpful and has worked with me on this noise issue.

Ken sent 2 different psu's (one for a 6W and the other for a 9W) led downlighter and on test the difference in noise is brilliant 

Here is the new led driver



Baseline test no led lighting



 New led driver

 

And finally the noisy original

 

 

My conclusion is that if we don't fight to keep our spectrum clean we will all be lost in the the noise..... Happy DXing and a Happy new year to all....G0SCI

Saturday 5 December 2015

Noise Noise Noise

Well after a week of total desperation i had to confront my neighbour about a very strong ( s9+) noise that had materialised....

What i found was he had fitted some ebay LED lamps in his bathroom which i had a look at and made a video of the noise that can be found here      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orm_pqqS35c   or direct below




I decided to open the psu up to see if it had any filtering and here is a pic of the noisy little beast
From there i decided to get the Rigol spectrum analyser out and do some noise tests so here goes with the baseline test
Then i done a sweep at 100Mhz with a 200Mhz span
At closer inspection you see the noise is very bad and it has a 25 - 30 Meter radius
Its not all bad! the neighbour is sympathetic to the problem and wants a resolution as much as me so we spoke the the ebay seller who sent out 2 units ( 1 x 6W and 1x 9W). The 6W is fairly quiet and we managed to use the 6W psu to run the 9W led and it let to me track the noise down  to the led psu driver.

I have to add the 6W to show you how different both units are.
 Same packaging just different pcb

As you can see its a lot quieter and has 1 - 2 Meter Noise radius

 I will let you know the outcome as the ebay seller helps us with the noise issue....73's for now G0SCI