Amateur radio help

[ShawnCowden]

what can I do to keep my radio from getting interference from a computer monitor and tower ? It does on certain freqs and quite a few in the VHF ham band

[jhooten]

Make sure your computer case is closed up properly.
Put ferrite cores on every cable going into or out of the computer case.
Don't trust the ground in the power cord. Ground the computer case.
Use an LCD monitor.

Won't totally eliminate the rf from the computer but it will cut it way down.

[SLWilson]

RF, from almost everything we by now is just THERE. From your coffee pot that keeps the water "warm" all of the time to your cordless telephone to your computer/printer and the list just goes on and on.

When you say "from the tower" what tower do you mean? Your tower or the local AM/FM station or a cellular tower?

All of those things cause RF and can interfere with your RX on any radio.

Shielding is good, but, it's best to get away from as many sources of RF as you can for your Amateur hobby !

Steve/KB8FAR

[ShawnCowden]

computer tower sorry

[kb0nly]

As already mentioned, get some snap on ferrites for the cables and ground the computer. I have very little if any noise from my Dell XPS. But it's case is mostly metal and seems to be better shielded than most. Back before i went to LCD monitors i remember the noise from my CRT. That was annoying! But some LCD's have noisy switching power supplies so the same noise mitigation applies.

[MeddleMan]

Move away the keyboard from the radio. It radiates like an antenna!

[Thayne]

I was tuning a repeater and found that my linksys ethernet switch in the same room was putting out a lot of rf on vhf, no way to stop it except power it down. I always thought it was coming from a nearby cell site until a buddy came over with a latest & greatest service monitor and found it.
It could be that rather than a computer.