[ADXA] power line blues

Sun Mar 22 15:18:46 EDT 2026

As of late at my station, most of the under rated arresters have been replaced with the proper MCOV rating that should have been there to start with. The discharging was horrendous when they would start tracking a lot of the times due to conducting.

Now, I’ve discovered a new disaster for HF communications. We have fiber lines installed about 3 years ago. After a nice couple of years, I’ve traced interference to where they dropped off to a 4 fiber service drop that has a floated tracer wire in it that is having induced voltages that occasionally finds a discharge path to the grounded supporting grip. This was designed for under ground service tracing, but the contractor was installing them under the primary neutral and above the phone lines (if existing) on overhead service drops. It was supposed to bonded to ground if used in overhead applications, but it wasn’t :(
One was causing S7 static on a beverage at 1/2 mile distance.

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________________________________
From: adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net <adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net> on behalf of WB5JJJ via ADXA <adxa at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2026 1:46:58 PM
To: Jussi Eloranta <eloranta at aa6kj.hopto.org>
Cc: ADXA <adxa at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [ADXA] power line blues

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<mailto: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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