[ADXA] power line blues

Sun Mar 22 14:46:58 EDT 2026

Several years ago, in late summer, I was plagued with power line noise.  I
took a scanner and set channels tuned on AM to 135.000Mhz, 1.600Mhz,
220.000Mhz, 29.000Mhz, 450.000Mhz, 50.000Mhz, 75.000Mhz and 800.000Mhz.  I
found that the 135.000Mhz AM had the best results in location the offending
pole.

I texted the guy I bought my house from who worked for Entergy, to stop by
some day and help me get the report to the right people at the company.  He
stopped by a couple days later on his way home from work.  I showed him
what I had found when I took a hammer to the pole in my back yard.  When
struck, the noise increased dramatically.  He went up in his bucket and saw
a potential problem, but since he was alone, he could do nothing at the
time.

He looked around and found a HV line that had been knocked off it's top of
pole insulator just one span away and was lying on a lower wooden cross
arm.  He said he had seen enough and would get it reported.

Two days later, 3 bucket trucks and about 10 employees showed up.  They
found the offending problem by listening on their cell phone as I feed them
the audio from my scanner while they tapped all the HV terminations until
it went crazy.  They found the problems pretty quickly as several
connections were loose.

After fixing that and the fallen HV line, they used my scanner and checked
about a block in each direction from my house and found no less then 3
broken HV insulators and a HV line splice across a main street that had
come partially apart and was internally arcing wildly.

They were so happy I called as they were able to fix everything in the
daylight and getting into back yards with bucket trucks during a very dry
spell.  In about 3 hours they were done.

One neighbor came out and thanked them as she could now listen the the
Razorback games play-by-play guys on the local AM radio station while
watching the game on TV since the static was now gone.

As for my reception, all was really quiet now, electrical noise-wise.  Been
that way for many years now.

-----

73's
George - WB5JJJ
HoIP - 100105
Cell - 479.857.7737

On Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 1:07 PM Jussi Eloranta via ADXA <
adxa at mailman.qth.net> wrote:

> Hi Stan,
>
> On 3/22/26 11:59 AM, Stan Stockton wrote:
> > I’m not sure what you have up but I know you have some Yagi antennas.
> Those antennas should have pretty sharp nulls off the side.  I would
> determine the general direction using the back of the antenna and then
> determine the exact direction with the side null.  If your antenna is
> pointed at 300 degrees, for example the null would be at 30 degrees or
> 210.  Check it on a couple different antennas to see that they agree.  Then
> I would plot the exact direction with a line on a mapping program.
> Depending on how far away the source is you may have a line that goes right
> through the pole on the map.  If you had a way to do something portable and
> have two lines from two starting points on the map, even better.  You could
> then go out with a portable radio and directive antenna, if possible, and
> confirm you have found it.
>
> I can now actually hear it also on 6m. Unfortunately, there may be at
> least two separate sources. One that gives a constant hum and the other
> that is intermittent.
>
> The hum is present on 160 but then dies off quickly, 80m hard to hear
> and then it can again be heard on 10 and 6m where the background noise
> is very low. So that leads me to think that it is located somewhat far
> away. This source is east from me (based on my 6m beam heading), along
> AR-115, which is about a mile away from me.
>
> The intermittent source (knocking / clicking), is likely from the nearby
> chicken house power line. But that that is west from me. Kind of hard to
> locate exactly as it just disappeared again.
>
> By the way, I found a nice way of tracking this on the radio. Set the
> radio to AM and run wsjt-x on it. You will see (well, hopefully you
> don't) nice lines of 60 Hz multiples. This is how I can detect it on 6m
> with 6 el yagi. Otherwise it is hard to hear by ear on 6m (on 160m it is
> loud).
>
> Looks like I have some more driving to do. But there is definitely the
> raspy hum at the chicken house power line.
>
> Jussi (aa6kj)
>
>
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