Long days & interference

Yesterday was one of those "long days" that as a system administrator, that I do on occasions. 

Expensive, complex systems that require work being done that needs to be completed end to end. Not even necessarily complex or difficult work.. until something goes wrong.

I was at work at 6am. I got home around 9pm. In the middle there was a window where I waited 2 hours for vendor support that turned out to be useless, and I eventually solved the problem they couldn't myself. 

During that wait time, I thought I'd remote in and have a look what was going on with FT8. The radio was left on my noisy but serviceable power supply (about to be replaced). The bands appeared noisy but dead. Interesting.

PSA: Never, ever allow your machine to be directly remotely accessible from the Internet. Ever. Every protocol you can think of for doing this makes it a target to be exploited, and protocols such as RDP tend to have a lot of holes that will be found and exploited by bots - often hours after exploits have been found in the protocol, huge chunks of the internet will have been probed. The first you'll know about it is likely that your home computers have ransomware on them and your data is held to ransom. If you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it's a miscreant who has directly accessed it, and they'll have control of your email, social media and bank accounts with you knowing about it. Until you get the credit card bill for the cards you didn't know you had. 

There are commercial offerings like Team Viewer, but even these come with some risk. 

My home network is business grade, and my router has VPN functionality built in. This allows me to create a secure method to connect to my home network from the outside world. ** This is something that needs careful setup and understanding of the various methods. A poorly setup VPN is worse than no VPN. 

Once connected, I can remotely access my computers, servers and other devices. 

Back to the story:

I vaguely recalled that the battery I normally use was on the charge. Hmmm. 

When I came home, I turned off the charger. FT8 looked as I expected.

 When you hear the click, this is the sound of the battery charger switched on, then eventually back off. The battery charger is remotely switched with the switch in the shack, but the unit itself in the garage (the other side of the wall). 

Yes, it's a mess. Something as simple as the noise from that charger is enough to nearly flatten my HF reception. The cheap switch mode is bad enough, though much quieter than that charger.

During the day 15m is normally pretty active, but it was dead, as was 40m while this was on.

I do have a new, quiet power supply coming that will wind up being in the shack. The battery charger will be off, and the power cables feeding the shack won't be on the garage side of the wall.. and away from 15RU of enterprise grade IT equipment that probably spews more noise than a Commodore doing single peggers down your street at 2am.

FWIW, I suspect this setup was screwing with my last attempts at receiving from the ISS as well. It really shouldn't impact VHF, but this was running like this during the last SSTV transmissions, and I didn't receive a thing when others nearby did. Anything that interferes with this is on my hit list.  

I have plans on replacing the current Diamond D-150 Discone with an X200A. That's an upgrade from an antenna that was designed for receiving that is 1m high to a 2.5m high with 6dB gain on VHF and 8dB on UHF.  I'm a little worried about doing this one though; the discone is currently attached to a 1.8m pole screwed into a larger mount holding my NBN FW antenna. I can't actually get up that high, so I need to unscrew the pole (which was hard enough to do the first time), pull it down, mount an even longer & heavier antenna on it, then put it back. This antenna is at least strong enough and high enough that I can probably lift it and the pole straight up whilst on the ladder and drop it in. I couldn't do that last time, so I was stuck trying to lift it upright whilst on the ladder.