Christmas Lights and RF

[N4GKS]

Walked into the radio room to listen around HF and couldn’t hear a thing for some kind of interference. Turned on the scanner and aircraft frequencies were also a mess. My wife has four Christmas trees set up in the house, so I figured it was one of them. Turned them off, and the noise went away. I can’t imagine Christmas lights causing that much interference to blank out a Kenwood TS-830 with its receiver.

 

[G6FGO]

Walked into the radio room to listen around HF and couldn’t hear a thing for some kind of interference. Turned on the scanner and aircraft frequencies were also a mess. My wife has four Christmas trees set up in the house, so I figured it was one of them. Turned them off, and the noise went away. I can’t imagine Christmas lights causing that much interference to blank out a Kenwood TS-830 with its receiver.

Chinese lowest price possible quality, switched mode power supplies, poor filtering, no screening and radial aerial cables all add up to big trouble with EMI.

 

[kb1fua]

Walked into the radio room to listen around HF and couldn’t hear a thing for some kind of interference. Turned on the scanner and aircraft frequencies were also a mess. My wife has four Christmas trees set up in the house, so I figured it was one of them. Turned them off, and the noise went away. I can’t imagine Christmas lights causing that much interference to blank out a Kenwood TS-830 with its receiver.

Ya know, it took me four years on and off to find some interference noise issue. Mine was on 75m, 60m, 40, 15,12, and 10.
In the end what i found out was that my wife replaced a few lights with led lights. Shutting them off worked, but I just got rid of them.
I dont know what Xmas lights you have/use but the led ones will cause noise issues.

 

[ecps92]

Walked into the radio room to listen around HF and couldn’t hear a thing for some kind of interference. Turned on the scanner and aircraft frequencies were also a mess. My wife has four Christmas trees set up in the house, so I figured it was one of them. Turned them off, and the noise went away. I can’t imagine Christmas lights causing that much interference to blank out a Kenwood TS-830 with its receiver.

LED's have pretty much always had RFI issues, from day one, not anything new, but with more use of them it is more prevelent.
Plenty of articles on the interwebs on how to resolve/abate them

 

[N4GKS]

This noise was awful. I mean the whole 20-75 meter spectrum was nothing but noise. Never heard anything like it.