Rick wrote:
A few months ago we had a discussion going here about my line noise problem
here in NJ.
I am happy to report the problem got fixed today, and K2XT is one happy Dude
! I further want to
warn 80 meter and 160 meter DX ops that I am back on the lower bands this
winter, have QRO,
and so look out Baby, I'm going to be able to hear that DX!

In great summary what we found a couple months ago was, driving from my
house along the roads near here,
we could locate line noise by using my FT-100 transceiver on different
bands, in AM mode. Although the
noise causes me the most problems on 80/160 my attempts at DF'ing it on
those bands were useless. On ten and
six meters the noise can be heard 1/4 to 1/2 mile away from the source.
Switch to 2 meters and I could
get a lot closer where the noise originated, within +/- 100 yards or so.
Switch to 440 and I could tell within a few poles.
Then as I reported before I built up a 440 MHz Quagi which enabled me to
stand across the road from the
offending pole and definitely pinpoint it.

Here's where it gets interesting. The particular technician I was working
with from the power company has
had great success using a hand held acoustic tool. This thing even has a
gun sight on it to enable him to
pinpoint the offending insulator/lightning arrestor/bad crimp, etc. On this
pole however, he couldn't get a
good reading. Today a crew worked on it, and finally determined it was a
bad transformer feeding two houses.
I guess that explains why the acoustic tool was ineffective. I had the 10 m
receiver here set so that when the
noise level dropped 6 db the squelch would close and so I was able to know
instantly when they had fixed it.

This noise source was 1.2 miles from my house. Noise was S9+5 db on 80 m
with a Beverage antenna,
S8 on 10 meters with a 3 ele beam. Having the beam indicate the direction
to look was very important.

A very frustrating 12 months + 6 days from the time I first reported it. 80
meters right now sounds like there's
no antenna connected. This is wonderful.

Rick K2XT



Congratulations. Your persistence really paid off.
--
Tom Horne

"This alternating current stuff is just a fad. It is much too dangerous
for general use." Thomas Alva Edison