Speaking of aerials, what's this....

but high rf fields can f*ck up all sorts of stuff

Most of my wifi problems have gone with the demise of my toshiba C50 laptop. F****ng broadcomm POS wifi chipset.

Invested in a SH HP probook. runs way faster and connects at 150Mbps and stays connected.

And yesterday in went CAT5 to the kitchen TV and WAP point, and out went the power over mains link. Reliability looms!

can you not be more exact ? ...tee hee

Disconnect the USB3 hard drive cabled to the machine currently... then retest.

The problem can be an RF source, very close to the affected items.

USB3 operates at 5GHz, and shows broad emissions at 2.4GHz and nothing at 5GHz. If you have dual band Wifi, the 5GHz band would work, while the

Figure 3-3 on the tenth page:

Another test case, is to have the keyboard and mouse on one side of the machine, and move the USB3 cable away to the other side of the machine, and see if keyboard/mouse situation improves.

Many years ago, a few HID devices ran at 27MHz, but that practice stopped a long time ago. You'd have to go out of your way to search Ebay, to find something that horrible today.

USB3 = 2.4GHz interference source (when active signals present) USB2 = Does not affect computer operation, as near as can be determined. If there are emissions, they do not collide with "useful" spectrum.

USB4/Thunderbolt = unknown??? Not heard any stories yet.

Paul

Description would be nice? Brian

I had to laugh the other day when a ham was describing his vhf aerial, He said its basically a colinear for 2 and 70cms, its made by a company called white stick but mine is green. Brian

Neighbour's chimney with a (approx) 4 metre mast with a 1 metre thin, pointed antenna of some sort on the end of it.

Some of the old CB aerials were vertical with a ground plane quite often and hams now adapt those for the 10 metre band as it only needs to be a little shorter. Often though its a colinear, as they do not need a ground plane.

I'd not worry about the height, very unlikely to get struck by lightning, for many hears I had a 15ft mast on the chimney with a rotatable five element fm aerial and a log periodic uhf TV array on top with a two stacked b group uhf array looking at hannington itv transmitter when itv regions actually showed different programmes. sob. Brian

That issue will have nothing to do with that aerial. Keep a log of when it does not work, if its always then it will not be that. More likely somebody next door has installed a wifi booster or mesh system and trashed the wifi frequencies. As for wireless keyboards, do you have anything else that is wireless nearby that can be turned off. At the frequencies these devices use its far more likely to be something very close than anything else. Brian

Unfortunately, USB3 has wiped out Wifi (2.4GHz) operation.

That's why Intel wrote the whitepaper (link) I quoted. So you'd be aware of yet another potential interference source.

Paul

It's around (4) log periodic or Yagi antennas pointed on a common vector.

And these are not conventional wide-band UHF, three of them look to be cut at a specific frequency. The fourth has some slight log-spacing to it. Dipoles are all the same length.

There are two verticals, attached to the top of the mast poles. They're unloaded. While they could be lightning arrestors, they have no spikey bit for generating corona and "attracting" the lightning.

If you tipped the letter "F" upside-down, the two arms of the F would represent the Yagi style antennas. The leg of the F (upside-down) would be the mast and vertical antenna orientation.

That's not all there is to see, but is some broad brush strokes of a picture. There's a roof and a chimney, and the chimney provides the mounting support.

Paul

Paul was thinking very hard :

They look as if they are probably fringe area TV yagi, all vertically polarised - probably feeding individual TV's, though less likely they might be set up as one antenna system, to try boost reception.

You are maybe seeing distortions of the photo/ different antenna brands.

At the back of the chimney - They look like remnants of old 1950's 405 line antennas to me. You can see part of the X of a 405 line antenna, peeping out from behind the chimney. The dipole of which, could be 405 line TV, or maybe an FM radio antenna.

The nearer vertical, with the much thicker feeder, could be anything at all. Whoever installed it, went to an awful lot of trouble, to extend the mast by a relatively small amount with a joiner clamp.

The actual antenna appears to be a white composite covered and also appears to taper from bottom to top.

better with a J Pole

Yes, I suggested that it could be a CB antenna yesterday. 5/8 wavelength base loaded verticals were very popular and had a good horizontal radiation pattern.

They were/are illegal of course to transmit using them but no one was ever prosecuted and told to take down.

mine has a good swr on 430 Mc/s as well as 2m......great things NanoVna's

How ironic, then, that this libertarian icon should spend her last days a dependant of "social security" and "socialized medicine". You couldn't make it up.

no

But you apparently, can... if you cant attack the message, always attack the messenger;

Especially when she displayed staggering hypocrisy.

I've told you, they are standard contract-quality cheapo TV aerials, Gp A and Gp C/D. I'd guess that the local Tx was Gp A then Channel Five started on 67 or 68.

Bill