Finding Noise

I've been reworking my desk layout. 

I have way too many cables floating around and I've been rationalising it. 

In doing that, I've gone after all of the things using switch mode power supplies - like the external hard drives I've had for a decade that I don't really use given their lack of reliability. 

I also managed to pull out two power boards. A plus. 

I happened to have the G90 on 7.171MHz - during some of the quiet moments I've been throwing out an SSTV CQ to see what happens. I usually keep the volume just loud enough to hear it. 

Playing around under the desk I temporarily unplugged my "work" laptop cable - "work" being I only use that laptop for work even though it's mine (and has a knackered keyboard). It's a beast of a thing - it's a Toshiba W50 - a Core i7 monster with 16GB RAM from an era before any rational person would have spent so much on such a beast. It has a 180w, 4 pin power supply. 

When it unplugged, I noticed a distinct silence. Well now.. I popped my head up, turned up the volume then plugged it back in. Then unplugged it. Hmmm.. S3 to S5 back to S3 on the G90. I threw the IC706 to the same frequency to compare. S9 down to S8, and a distinctly audible drop in noise. 

The power supply has a hardwired ferrite on the DC side - clearly not enough, so I added a couple more. Seems to have made a little difference - the signal meters are now bouncing around between the difference. 

I've been debating moving across to my actual work laptop. It's got less CPU power, but it's more modern and drags quite a bit less power. That matters. The bulk of my IT gear is run from a double GPO on the wall opposite the study that doubles as the shack. From there, power goes to a pair of industrial UPSes, out to a pair of PDUs via pair of 10A circuit breakers, and from there power is distributed into the rack, and to a power point in the study. According to my new PowerPal gizmo, turning those two GPOs off cuts out 1kW of constant drag (more interesting is that the safety switch cut out as I wrote that). 

The power saving is probably worth it. It's just a bit of work in getting everything across. There's also a stack of personal apps as it was my main "Windows" machine (I'm a Linux/FreeBSD person). Some of those apps will transition over to the radio PC given it's Windows (Yeah, yeah.. some of the apps I want to use aren't on Linux), and others will just have to land on a virtual machine.

No doubt I could cut down some noise further if I turned off a few more things. 

I did put a couple of clip on ferrites in my PC. I need bigger ones to deal with the motherboard cable. The rationalisation of cables did free up a few more, but those quickly landed on the "work" laptop cable.