Malachit as a noise hunter

40m.. it's noisy. I keep saying that. I call S8 on my dipole good. At 6am.. after I did some things to quieten things down. At least on my IC706.

Last night I did a run around with the Malachit SDR..on 40m.. and a paperclip for an antenna. That was... interesting.

I realised that quite simply it was pretty effective for finding noise sources.. and has that waterfall just to show me lovely lines 50Hz apart.

Interesting findings:

- The Toshiba W50 laptop on my desk.. Oh that makes a lot of noise. So does it's power supply. Turn it off.. Quiet.  Interesting

- The other Toshiba laptop on my desk. Pretty quiet. 

- My 43" monitor. Pretty quiet.

- My 27" monitor. A little noisy if the "antenna" almost touches it.

- The security camera monitor. Pretty noisy (until I unplugged the W50). 

- The rack with all of my server gear. Actually pretty quiet. 

- The 6KVA UPS. Quiet except for a bit of noise around the control panel. 

- The power feeding the UPS.. a bit noisy. 

- The PDUs hanging off the UPS.. surprisingly quiet. 

- The LED lighting on my Tiger Oscar's tank driven by a PWM controller. A bit noisy. The drivers... umm.. not great.

- The Reef tank and it's plethora of PWM driver LED lights and switch mode power supplies. That nearly hurt.

I can't blame all the tank lighting. The noise floor is still about the same with them off. The drivers on the Tiger Oscar's tank are all Meanwells, so they should be reasonable. The LEDs on the reef tank are all major brands so their power supplies are about as good as you can get for reef tank light power supplies (for whatever that statements worth). 

Clearly though I probably should endeavour to do a little more re-mediation work:

- Ferrites on the mains side of the the tiger oscar's drivers and on the DC side

- More ferrites on both sides of what's in the reef tank. It needs a good tidy up anyway. 

- Investigate the new beer fridge. It's just dawned on me that the noise floor seems higher coinciding with it arriving. 

- Toroids on the IC706's DC and RF side. It currently has a stack of clip ons. 

I did strip out the wiring yesterday and moved all of the radio wiring from behind my desk away from all of the mains stuff. It's quite a bit tidier back there now, though it's overall made a negligible difference. 

Of course it could all just be that the calibration of the noise meter on my IC706 is off whack too. It is 20 years old after all. My G90 doesn't reflect a noise floor quite so high. 

One might draw two conclusions - either the IC706 is suffering from old age or the IC706 is showing its superior sensitivity over the G90. I don't really know which. I think I need someone with a good radio to come in, hook up on my desk and we'll compare notes.