I'm planning to build a garden room to house my amateur radio equipment.
Naturally I'd like it to be as energy efficient as possible but I'm aware that LED lighting has a reputation for generating interference across the HF bands.
Any suggestions on how to minimise this please?
Mike G8GYW
It rather depends how far you want to go, and if you sit in the half dark illuminated by the lights of the meter on the TX ?
Yes you want some proper lighting too, but falling back to the LEDs is still a handy diagnostic to be able to turn the mains lights off, and still see the mug of tea.
As you have TT earthing you will need to be careful not to inject too much crap into the system - every mA RMS into or out of the earth electrode is 10mV of ground bounce if your electrode is 10 ohms, and it may be higher than that. A balanced antenna relative to shack earth really helps.
It is quite fun/ helpful to put a split ferrite ring with perhaps 5-10 turns of thin wire to a coax to the receiver input to make a clip on “RFI current finder” to evaluate how much of an issue various things are going to be before you wire them in. If when you clip it round the mains or battery lead the interference levels pegs the meter, it is worth looking at some more filtering or a change of device.
image of home made clamps similar to what I mean - taken from here
It rather depends how far you want to go, and if you sit in the half dark illuminated by the lights of the meter on the TX ?
Yes you want some proper lighting too, but falling back to the LEDs is still a handy diagnostic to be able to turn the mains lights off, and still see the mug of tea.
As you have TT earthing you will need to be careful not to inject too much crap into the system - every mA RMS into or out of the earth electrode is 10mV of ground bounce if your electrode is 10 ohms, and it may be higher than that. A balanced antenna relative to shack earth really helps.
It is quite fun/ helpful to put a split ferrite ring with perhaps 5-10 turns of thin wire to a coax to the receiver input to make a clip on “RFI current finder” to evaluate how much of an issue various things are going to be before you wire them in. If when you clip it round the mains or battery lead the interference levels pegs the meter, it is worth looking at some more filtering or a change of device.
image of home made clamps similar to what I mean - taken from here
