I experience crappiness in guitar tone that follows a very rigid weekly pattern. For instance, the rig reliably puts out amazing "mojo" Sunday evenings. Every Monday morning, there is something somewhat displeasing and blatty in the tone that cannot be EQ'd out.<p>High gain distortion are susceptible due to their nonlinearity. Any RF mixing in there gets modulated down into the audio band. I greatly improved the issue with ferrite beads, but not 100%.<p>Not all music equipment has good defenses against the ingress of RF. Shunt capacitors on inputs are often omitted, and series inductors are rarely used. The grounding isn't the best: often, unbalanced input and output jacks have ground connections to the audio circuit board, rather than to a Kelvin ground at the power supply. RF can get into the board via that path.
This can be fixed, however, electronics will cost more when properly designed and filtered. Until interference impacts a lot of people (not just hams and OTA TV viewers) no one will care enough to do anything about it.
My grandfather has a theory that it's the PG&E Smart water meters that have been rolling out that's doing this...<p>I'm not a radio guy, so I don't know how plausible that sounds.
I posted this the other day, looks like it missed dupe-detection ? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11946490" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11946490</a>
How can this be a real problem with exponential signal loss over distance? Sure, two devices in close proximity may interfere with each other. But that is in no way a "noise floor issue which will render certain frequencies unusable."
Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with cell phones, and in particular, the high bandwidth data consumption of smart phones.<p>Look toward a city skyline at night. Or even a small town. You'll see a blended haze of light reaching up into the sky. Probably a similar deal with the general radio spectrum emissions, now that everyone's carrying the equivalent of pocket RF flash lights, and walking in proximity to the RF street lamps that cell phone towers have become.