[hpsdr] spikes

[Erik Anderson]

Okay, after a couple weekends of "no HPSDR radio found" I managed to get
everything to power up again and... the signal seems clear.  At least clear
enough to hear people talking from the other side of the country (although
WWV is still extremely faint).  At this point I'm not sure whether it's the
new firmware, new software, new ethernet cable, new refrigerator, or
different radio position (are wood stoves considered grounded? it's a
rather large hunk of metal in any case), although I'm grateful that the
thing seems to be working again.

I am still interested in knowing where I can buy "red coils" or something
usefully equivalent, in the case that I still decide to make my own HPF (at
least before spending the money for Alex).  I'm assuming that TAPR likely
has very few of these available (if any), is there a good website I can go
to where I can at least learn the difference between red coils and black
coils?

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Erik Anderson <
erikba at odysseus.anderson.name> wrote:

> My wife is likely to be out of town this weekend so it may be a good time
> to "shut down the house" and see what happens.
>
> The fact that I saw the same pattern at the local ACS meeting (which I
> think was inside of an unused aircraft storage bay) but a clean signal east
> of the mountains leads me to believe that (1) it's not my equipment (it
> would be nearly impossible to resolve if my netbook was the source) and (2)
> it's not a _single_ piece of equipment that is doing this.
>
> Even if I track down the local source of interference, it still doesn't
> really give a solution as to what to do with it (if I can't avoid it).  The
> closest thing I can think of is (1) make sure the case is as close to a
> faraday cage as possible (i.e. ground the heck out of it) and (2) stick a
> ~1 MHz HPF on the incoming antenna connection and hope that all the spikes
> are just harmonics (may start out with a single tuned inline capacitor as
> coils seem to be more difficult to find).
>
> Thank you all for your feedback here.  I do feel bad for asking so many
> people for help for so long a time in this, hopefully this will help focus
> me on resolving this.
>
> I'm actually surprised that the Extra test covers so much of this kind of
> stuff too, which was a nice kick in the butt on learning how to fix this...
>
>
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