If you've been following along, you'll remember one of the reasons I'm building a portable RF shack is that my house is full of RF interference which is causing me problems. I'm going to try and track down the source of the interference, eliminate it if I can, and hopefully learn a bunch of stuff along the way.
Right now I'm in the very early stages of troubleshooting. Shortly after I got my handheld (a Baofeng GT3 Mk2) I noticed that it would break squelch in certain areas of my house while tuned to the local 2m repeater. When the squelch opens, all I hear is static.
My first thought was that some piece of computer gear was causing the interference, so one morning while everyone else was asleep, I tried to do some rudimentary investigation. I placed my radio in a location where it was picking up the interference, then I shut down my server, and cut power to my network stack. The noise went away. A little further experimenting pointed me to the ethernet switch.
However, changing the switch to a different model resulted in the same interference. Also, it seems that the interference is only present if there's an ethernet device connected to the switch.
A little later on, a friend of mine loaned me his SDR (software defined radio). I plugged it into my computer, installed HDSDR, and took a look at the waterfall display. I could easily see signals present all through the 2m amateur band, spaced at something like 30-50Khz intervals. Reading on the internet doesn't point me to any definite sources.
At this point I'm devising some more rigorous scientific testing so that I can conclusively narrow down the source of the interference. I'll post the results of my experiments here, so stay tuned.
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