I made the move to a new place a few weeks back. This place is only a few minutes from my old place, but for HF listening it’s a dream for me.
The neighborhood has all underground utilties. No more AEP poles, distribution lines or high tension towers surrounding my property. Did I mention AEP sucks? Well they do.
I’m restricted as far as putting up antennas, but I was able to get a PAR EZ-SWL antenna and string it up between my back porch deck and a tree at the end of the yard.
This antenna is an end-fed 45 foot piece of wire, with the SO-239 and some grounding screws securely mounted on a block. Depending on the type of noise you get, it may be possible to eliminate or lessen the noise depending on how you ground things.
I threw up the EZ-SWL in this location and immediately I could tell it was much much quieter than my old place. Because I have so much less external noise (no power line noise at the moment), I am not able to hear the RFI inside myself. So I started shutting off my various computer components to figure out what the biggest offenders were. My Linksys WRT54GS router is nasty, especially when the connected computers are running 100 mbit. I set all hardwired computers to force 10 mbit/full duplex. I don’t particularly like the slower speed across the LAN between computers, but it has tremendously cut down on the RFI I get from the Linksys. I’ll be investigating the various ferrite beads / torroidal cores for eliminating the RFI across the board.
My sister has an office here. All of her computer components are plugged into a 6 port surge protector / power strip. Even with all of her components turned off, as long as the power strip is turned on there is some leftover RFI. If I turn off all of her equipment and then shut the power strip off, there goes most of my RFI.
At the same time I was moving, I bought an Icom R-75 off of Ebay. It has the UT-102 voice synthesizer (no big deal – useless) and the UT-106 DSP (again useless since it is an AF-stage DSP and not an IF-stage DSP). The R-75 though is a great receiver for the money.
Last night after I got done ridding myself of some RFI within the house, I decided to tune down to 500 khz and below (something I never bothered to do before because for 13 years I had S20+ signals from 160 m (2 mhz) on down. Anyway, much to my surprise and happiness I was hearing beacons all over the place below 500 khz – tons from canada, ohio, PA and some other areas. It was nearly silent down below 500 khz. It was absolutely great. I never realized how much I was missing.
I then tuned to 160 m – same thing – near complete quiet. The 160 m stations were booming in. I had no trouble listening to long conversations on 160 and 80 m because the quality was so good and the noise was nonexistent. Now, this is what HF monitoring is supposed to be about! At about 2 AM I was listening to stations from England on 80 m that I would never have heard from my old location.
The move was a good move, from every standpoint. I could not be happier with my new location, my R-75, or the PAR EZ-SWL. Everything is working great!