electrical disturbances

Hi Stuart,

We experienced the same thing a couple weeks ago and traced it to a bad ballast in a florescent fixture within our building.

clyde

isolated????? That can be dangerous. An isolated/dedicated ground back to the service/source is the way to go. Best is to connect all of the sound equipment to an common ground. That way every thing is on the same potential. If your issue is related to an time of day then locate what is different during that time. Check out the Soars book on grounding at the public library.

I had an situation in an research building that ground current was circulating on the ether net cables. The labs were on one transformer and the offices were on another. Connecting the transformers ground systems together solved the problem.

Get a portable AM radio and tune it between stations at the low end of the dial. Go around your house/neighborhood with it when the noise is present and try to find where the noise is coming from. If it seems to be coming from a power pole, give the pole a whack with a sledge hammer and see if that affects it. If so, call the power company and tell 'em to fix it.

Get a cheap portable radio and start walking in the direction of increasing noise. If the noise is evident on AM broadcast bands, the directionality of the typical ferrite bar antennas will aide you in locating the source.

While completely logical, whacking power poles will likely attract attention of the idiot public which may cause trouble for the whacker. John

It sounds like your speaker wires are acting as antenna and picking up something in the area.

You can either try to find it, or you can replace your speaker wire with coaxial cable. Ground the shield at one end; use the insulated conductors for your speaker wires; and this should go away.

(The same thing happened to me a few years back when I was a cave dweller. A neighbour moved in with a ham radio. I was privy to all of his conversations until I did this. Then, "Hey Presto!", the problem went away.

Good luck.

HR.

Right. You might as well chant "Allahuakbar!!" while you're whacking away and see how fast the homeland security folks show up. ;-)