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If we ever move, I plan just to pound mine in a bit further! (They are slightly below the surface anyway).
Other things to double check:
- When you turn off the computer, be sure to actually use “shutdown” on windows and not just cut the power in some way. It should take a few seconds and not just disappear from the screen. If you don’t do that, some things will not have been written to the disk, and Windows will have to re-created them on reboot.
- Last time Windows took forever, it was because it was updating. Usually it will tell you it is, but for mine, it did not say so for some time.
Unfortunately, I’m not very good at Windows stuff. I usually use a Mac or Linux for most things, but that also means that my Windows machine is not booted very often and often has a lot of these problems.
I totally agree with Hamilton. The Prolific chipsets are, as I recall, no longer supported (or at least the driver is not provided) on newer versions of Windows. Definitely pay attention to the chipset.
Another good brand I’ve used several times (connecting to rotator controllers and radios) is Keystone.
I’d guess (and someone with more knowledge should speak up) that 60Hz is not a big deal. But the problem is with the pretty high voltage lines like this is that they tend to arc in high humidity, and that makes quite a mess of QRM both RF and AF! The good news is that it wastes electricity, so sometimes I have heard that the power company will respond to complaints.
Hi Bob,
There is another topic here about solar panels that you might want to review. (https://www.n1fd.org/forums/topic/rooftop-solar-and-rfi/) I also have solar panels and have no problem although I am essentially always on only VHF and UHF for satellites.
My understanding is that the main RF noise-maker is the micro-inverters, string inverter, or optimizer, with the optimizer being the worst. So whether you need to worry about the panels or your box inside for RFI depends on what sort of inverter is where.
I can’t help with the other parts of your question.
For reasons unknown, I could not connect with my iPhone (timeout) yesterday during boot camp not today. Then I tried EchoTest (which used to work) and that also failed. I finally deleted the app from my phone and re-installed. Of course I could not find the password or even the email address I had used, so I had to validate again, but that took only 10 minutes or so.
And now it is working fine! And btw, for those with a new Mac using Apple Silicon, the iPhone app works fine on that as well.
I have an NTP server built into a raspberry pi with a GPS dongle and I have all my shack computers syncing to it. Thus I (nominally) am connected to a Stratum 1 server. Not that I need microsecond accuracy, but it was fun to set up.
Jay, you might send an email to Bob. He is very interested in both solar and radio and will likely respond. I think he also has a relatively recent ARRL book on power systems.
Re the optimizers and cutoff: Oh, I see. interesting. I was wondering why they did that. I guess the micros perform the same function.
Jay, as I recall ReVision tended to use single-string inverters in general. That would have been fine on my roof which is unshaded and all pointing in the same direction. However, apparently (per Bob Bruninga) *optimizers* are even worse for RFI than microinverters (I think they are DC-to-DC converters). But essentially the change to microinverters was all for RFI–largely because it kept all the conversion at a distance and did not have optimizers. (I probably would not have needed an optimizer since my panels are all so consistently pointed and not shaded, but they don’t do it that way anymore).