Less Quiet On The Western Front
It's just that little bit less fun being a short-wave listener these days...
Your Editor is old enough to remember long overs on 80m AM when the topic was receiver noise. This strangely comforting hiss, a form of ‘pink noise’ created in the first stage of our receivers never bothered us as we never chased the DX that could be so easily lost in it. Did anyone else try to replace the first RF valve of their AR88 with an EF183? Everybody did, surely?
We still take an hour on a Saturday morning to hear AM live in the form of the VMARS Net on 3615 KHz. But now it’s almost impossible to hear them. A wideband hiss sometimes referred to by G3’s as ‘sharsh’ covers the whole of 80m at about S7.
Like receiver noise back in the days when it was an issue, this S7 hash is now my noise floor. To hear anyone, they have to be a generous S8 and for that wonderfully evocative ‘armchair copy’, stations have to be S9 Plus to offer any reasonable ‘signal to sharsh ratio’.
Where Is This Noise Coming From?
It has not taken too much detective work. Thanks to the iPod Generation, it’s not too weird to walk the streets wearing headphones nowadays. It’s just that mine are plugged into a TRIO R11, a shortwave portable given to me by radio guru John Wilson.
The interference is everywhere now, propagated by electrical wiring. The source? Wireless hubs in countless homes. Don’t get me wrong, Wi-Fi is the future but there is major EMC issues with the power supplies and processors radiating noise across the radio spectrum.
We SWL’s are in the minority but at my QTH the QRN only tails off at about 76MHz allowing reasonable FM reception. Pulse noise from Freeview set-top boxes even go high enough to punch holes in DAB reception.
What happened to EMC controls?
We can ask but we are second-class spectrum users and really don’t have a voice. There is an online petition to the UK government but in the affairs of State, can you really expect a radio listener to have any priority?
All we can do is keep campaigning and hope that The VMARS Saturday AM Net, GB2RS and G3LYW make it above the noise. So far, the noise is winning. Sorry, chaps...