[AMRadio] The Great Jackson, Mississippi Noise Hunt

[Mike Duke, K5XU]

My quest to find and eliminate noise in my neighborhood was the final 
acorn that convinced my wife that she may indeed have married herself 
to a squirrel!

Nevertheless, she passed her own Amateur Extra in July of this year, 
of which I am indeed proud.

Round 1 with the power company was over a strong hash which rendered 
the spectrum from below the AM broadcast band through 5 MHZ completely 
useless.

After said company located the approximate location of the noise, we 
agreed that it  wasn't being caused by them. They actually went house 
to house, pulling meters until it went away.

At that point, I called the FCC, who found the culprit. It was a DVD 
player a block away which had been damaged during a thunderstorm the 
day that noise began.

I must say that I was very surprised how quickly the New Orleans 
office responded. It basically took one phone call, followed by an mp3 
sample of the noise e-mailed to them, and they were here within the 
next month.

Contrast that with 6 months and multiple calls to the power company.

I was also having traditional power line sounding noise up through the 
tuning range of my 2 meter rig.

The FCC suggested to both my public utility and me that we continue to 
work together on that one, which led us to round 2.

Despite that suggestion, it took spectrum analyzer pictures taken by 
two engineer friends six months later to really get the utility's 
attention again.

The short story on this one is that the utility all but crawled 
through the street begging me to please not send those pictures to the 
FCC.

After they duplicated the spectrum analyzer results with their 
equipment 3 times, the hardware on 6 different poles had to be 
overhauled or completely replaced.

The important lesson is do not let the power company brush you off. 
Keep after them, and bring in the re-enforcement's if they keep 
jerking you around.


Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs