{"id":2491,"date":"2015-10-02T10:07:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T00:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/10\/02\/old-spark-but-thankfully-not-forever\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:23:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T03:23:10","slug":"old-spark-but-thankfully-not-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/10\/02\/old-spark-but-thankfully-not-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Spark (But Thankfully Not Forever)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the last couple of weeks I have been plagued by noise on the HF bands. In spite of being in a very built-up area of Northern Virginia, I usually have low noise levels. But for the last couple of weeks I’ve had intermittent but frequent arcing noise. It sounded like classic power line arcing. <\/strong>
<\/strong>
My 17 meter Moxon antenna provided a clue as to where it was coming from: As I spun the antenna around, the noise was always a lot stronger to the North-North West. <\/strong>
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On Wednesday morning on the way to work I noticed that the fire department and the power utility were working frantically on a pole about a mile from our house. It had obviously been on fire — it was still smoking when we went past. <\/strong>
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When I got home I was pleasantly surprised to find the arcing noise gone. It took me a few minutes to make the connection — yes, the smoking power pole was to my North-North West. <\/strong>
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OBVIOUSLY THE RADIO GODS CAME TO MY ASSISTANCE! <\/strong>
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This was a good demonstration of the fine front-to-back characteristic of the Moxon antenna. And a reminder of what radio signals sounded like in the days of spark. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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The 9CS transmitter (from <\/span>http:\/\/www.ontheshortwaves.com\/EarlyAmateur.html<\/span><\/a>)<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last couple of weeks I have been plagued by noise on the HF bands. In spite of being in a very built-up area of Northern Virginia, I usually have low noise levels. But for the last couple of weeks I’ve had intermittent but frequent arcing noise. It sounded like classic power line arcing. … Continue reading “Old Spark (But Thankfully Not Forever)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180,100,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-moxon","category-old-radio","category-radio-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions\/2494"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}