RFI Woes...

I’ve got to be honest, this isn’t something I’ve ever really dealt with. I usually take pride in keeping my station well grounded and antennas properly tuned.

While preparing for field day, I was testing a few antenna configuration at the QTH. This year I’ll be operating 3D from my QTH. My original plan was to install 4 dipoles for the low bands 2 each for 40 meters and 80 meters. I reasoned that my location on the east coast would make 40 and 80 meter contacts fairly easy up and down the coast.

I can usually cover from Maine all the way down to Florida without issue on 40. I don’t have a lot of time racking up QSOs on 80 though, so it’d be kind of new for me.

In any case. I installed the first 80, after installing one of the 40 meter dipoles elsewhere. There is really only 1 way to get enough spacing between 2 80 meter dipoles on my property. What I hadn’t counted on was the interference issue.

I keyed up to do a few RBN tests of the antenna, and my internet completely dropped.

This was confirmed by a few morse tests. Additionally, the network to my Antenna Genius 8x2 was dropping as well. It was obvious that the antenna was coupling with the ethernet cable I’d run to my shack wall drop.

If you’ve ever read here, you’d know my other hobby, is a home lab. That’s a home server, network, routers, etc.

I recently did a bit of a revival of my home lab including snagging a really nice 42U rack off marketplace. Thank you to my wife Lauren for that find!

My network was very fragmented as I was still building out the converted garage to an office and ham shack. So my network drops all landed in one end of the room, the 20 amp outlets for my UPS were on the other.

I took the cheap way out and added a small wall mount network rack and a single 24 port patch panel and landed 24 cables to the new server rack with all of the network hardware.

I’m sure everyone reading this has identified my problem. I’ve just doubled the length of my network cables, and no it was not shielded cable.

I should have probably run all new cable, but with drywall installed in this room already and not wanting to crawl through my attic to rerun all of the other drops in the house, I took and a chance and physics kicked me in the backside for it.

So where am I at now. Well, I moved some antennas around hoping that maybe 40 meters would be less invasive. It wasn’t.

So I’m just waiting now on a few shielded cables, we’ll skip the wall jacks for now and run cables around the shack for now. After Field Day, maybe we’ll replace those lines and make them more direct OR shielded cable.

Kind of disappointing but I did this to myself. This ultimately means, we’re going to be down one planned 80 meter station for now and will just have to live with a single 80 meter station this year.

Unless I really want to go back and reposition all of these antennas again?