Old TV death ray?

[sandall]

Can any of you ex-BT types shed any light on this?

https://www.bbc.co.u...-wales-54239180

[radiomike]

Not a bbc guy, but have a look at this link for some more info about shine and rein interference.

 

https://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/Broadband-Understanding-REIN-and-SHINE#:~:text=In%20both%20cases%2C%20a%20power,by%20the%20ADSL%20Broadband%20service.&text=SHINE%20is%20where%20this%20interference,is%20switched%20on%20or%20off.

 

Also, this kind of thing is not uncommon. Recently had someone using a circular saw a few houses away on the other side of the street, causing disconnects for me while it was being used.

[alistermorton]

Friend of mine who does, amongst other things, emissions analysis of appliances, was saying some very cheap domestic led fixtures give off so much rfi they can interfere with networks.

[dbuckley]

Why 612KHz?

[Pete McCrea]

Love that they are REIN and SHINE faults - making engineers lives a problem what ever the weather!

[Andrew C]

Whatever happened to the requirement that equipment was immune to EMI? Oh wait, was that one of those Euro laws that everyone hated so much?

[Simon Lewis]

Whatever happened to the requirement that equipment was immune to EMI? Oh wait, was that one of those Euro laws that everyone hated so much?

 

In the story, the culprit was an old pre EMC TV, although the noise generation was a result of a fault rather than its normal working characteristic.

 

When I changed some dOmeStic lighting to LED GU10, I found that an old clock radio could no longer operate without quite loud interference... the reassuringly expensive DAB replacement didn't suffer the same problem.

 

I have seen supposedly EMC compliant goods cause significant interference, simply because individual parts may well have been compliant, but the assembly or system wasn't. There seems to have been an assumption that making a system out of compliant parts will ensure compliance.... it ain't necessarily so.

[Andrew C]

It isn't just the interferer that should be compliant, but the interfered with.

[sandall]

One thing I love about the BR is that, like Melvyn Bragg's "In our time" radio programme, you can find out all sorts of things that you didn't know you didn't know

[timsabre]

It isn't just the interferer that should be compliant, but the interfered with.

 

I do a lot of EMC related stuff and a high proportion of products do not actually comply with the standards even though they are marked that they do.The fact is that compliance is rarely checked unless there is a problem, so mostly they get away with it.

 

[kerry davies]

I have no idea what you lot are on about with EMC and regulations but the wonderful Openreach peeps used something called an RF Spectrum Analyser and found an elderly retired couple watching Piers Morgan while in bed with their morning cuppa so they got them to do the socially responsible thing and chuck TV, Piers and all in a skip.

 

This plague of Piers's has to be stopped at source if lockdown is to be worth the effort.

[dosxuk]

Whatever happened to the requirement that equipment was immune to EMI? Oh wait, was that one of those Euro laws that everyone hated so much?

 

I don't think that implies that it has to carry on working as intended while subjected to the interference, only that it doesn't self destruct. A radio mic receiver can pass an EMI test, but if you blast it with interference in the frequencies it's trying to pick up at then it will struggle to give you a clean signal from it's intended microphone and I wouldn't consider that to be a failure of the EMI test.

 

These sort of things happen quite regularly. I know of a nearby case where a faulty outdoor discharge lamp starter circuit was causing an entire village's broadband to reset every night. The faulty light was also on a light sensor rather than timer so it was even harder to work out when it would happen.

[timsabre]

Whatever happened to the requirement that equipment was immune to EMI? Oh wait, was that one of those Euro laws that everyone hated so much?

I don't think that implies that it has to carry on working as intended while subjected to the interference, only that it doesn't self destruct.

No that's not right. It has to keep working properly at a certain specified level of interference. The level varies depending on the type of product and includes constant and impulse noise. Obviously if the interference goes above that level, then bad things may start to happen.

Edited September 23, 2020 by timsabre

[bruce]

Why 612KHz?

That's a good question, and one where googling has not been productive.

[J Pearce]

I suspect the issue is in the decades old cabling, likely acting as an antenna. Even if the router (and DSLAM at the other end) is EMC compliant, if there's more noise than signal on the line there's not much that can be done.

 

I've (hopefully) just finished a 5 month argument with my ISP, that openreach has (hopefully) finally resolved by removing 300m of extraneous cabling from our line (for unknown reasons our line went past the house, down the street, across the road, back up the street, across the road, then to our pole) which they think was acting as an antenna and picking up interference from the nearby electrified railway. The kiss of death was the pull-lines for fibre being installed, which broke all the rotten 100 year old insulation and needed half the street switching onto spare pairs.

 

If we'd followed BT's advice in the 90s and gone to fibre we'd be sorted, but it wasn't to be and instead we keep bolting cleverer and more just-on-the-edge-of-working kit onto a cabling infrastructure that in places is over 100 years old, and was only ever designed for voice circuits.