Attracting Attention But Doing Well

I have been out four of the last five nights, walking the streets and back roads looking for power line noise. I usually head out around 7:00 PM when the temperature is dropping and there is no direct sun to contend with. Heat doesn’t agree with me. I’m out between three and seven hours. Last night was the shortest. I didn’t get out until 10:00 (because I was watching the U.S. Open) and arrived home shortly after 1:00 AM. Many of these problems are intermittent, so one has to check each area several times in order to locate all (or most) of them.

After dark most people pretty much seem to ignore me, perhaps not wanting to take any chances on me being some sort of madman!? But in the earlier hours when it’s still light I have had a number of people stop and ask what in the world I’m doing. Some know who I am and some are total strangers.  Most are surprised by the concept of power lines causing radio interference, ask a few questions, wish me luck, and move on. So far this hasn’t presented any real problem for me! That’s odd, don’t you think? I’m a little surprised I haven’t had a visit from the local police. By now I expected someone would have called them to check out this lunatic roaming the streets at night waving some bizarre device around! Perhaps the fact I’m wearing a bright florescent orange and yellow vest helps? That should make it obvious I’m not trying to be invisible or sneaky. It’s the last thing someone up to no good would be wearing at night!

Dear readers (those who have been following my story for a while), please make sure you are sitting down for this. 🙂 You’ll never believe this… but Friday morning I called the power company noise troubleshooter and left a voice mail! He called back around noon and we made an appointment to get together on this problem next Thursday, weather permitting.

The hunt has been going reasonably well. There are, not surprisingly, multiple problems in the area. I have 13 confirmed noisy poles on my list and several suspected but not confirmed due to a large area being “flooded” with noise from one particular pole. That makes it hard to hear lesser offenders. I stumbled upon that really bad one around midnight last night, somewhat by accidental discovery. I had been concerned about the fact once I got past a certain point on my street almost every pole seemed noisy, and they all had the same noise characteristics. It just didn’t seem logical. Finally last night I realized this noise might  be generated elsewhere and simply propagating along the power line, radiating from the multitude of hardware on each pole along the way. On that premise I began to walk side streets, even ones that seemed relatively quiet when I pointed my “sniffer” down them. As I crested a slight hill on one of them, the noise I’d been hearing from every pole in a large area suddenly became a deafening roar, completely overloading my sniffing device. Aha! The hill had been blocking direct pickup of the noise, and what I’d been hearing was the result of some small portion of it conducted out along the lines. That pole is the worst I have found yet. By some technical wizardry I have been able to determine that it is, in fact, one of the biggest contributors to the noise interfering with radio operations from my home. When I meet with the troubleshooter I plan to ask if he would consider starting with that pole, even though it is nearly a mile and a half from where I live.

Anyway, enough of that. The point of this post was: I’m getting a lot of exercise, feeling better, and have been unusually high functioning in dealing with people since I embarked on this project.