RF is unbearable

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SS454

SS454

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I have a big problem with RF in my studio. I can hear it through the input on my MP. During tracking! What do I do to control this?
 
I have a friend here in St. Louis with the same problem. He has a home studio in his basement and there are two 1000' TV transmitter towers less than a 1/4 mile from his back door. I know he had to build a faraday cage around his entire room. I beleieve he used something like chicken wire that raps around the room 360 degrees and is bonded together and then he has 8' gound rods driven around the parimeter of the room every 8' attached to the cage.
 
Track is right. That's about the only way to eliminate serious RF interference.

I've heard of it being done more than once.

Does your buddy live under the KSDK and KMOV towers?
 
The channel 4 and 11 tower. Both transmit antennae are on the same tower. Damn near all the towers except 9 are pretty damn close to each other.
 
What a nightmare. That footprint must be at least a couple of miles in diameter for that kind of wattage.
 
Holy crap! Thats a lot of work. I don't think I can do that in my apartment. What about RF chokers for cables. Any experience with these? Any luck?
 
You will need some good power condittioning.
The cheapest option - by a long margin - is to purchase a recon. condittioner from my friend "Mr. Patchbay". He has some great PowerVar units for sale right now.

Proper power condittioning is one of the most essential elements of running any studio, from home to high end pro.
When you use good power condittioners, you will reduce your noise (in most cases eliminate it altogether). Not only that, it will IMPROVE YOUR AUDIO QUALITY.
 
both track rat and sjoko have it-in many cases, the electrical system acts as a great big antenna, loading up on all that lovely bleed off of big transmitters. if you're hardcore, do both. i'd love to have a faraday cage on my house, but i'm also insane :D
 
Start with a decent power conditioner, such as Furman PM-8, and upgrade all cables where possible. You wouldn't believe what a difference it made when I upgraded my guitar cable from a standard Monster instrument cable to a Monster keyboard cable. That killed 90% of my RFI (and transformer bleed/hum) right there.-Richie
 
ham operators have books that help in comercial stuff (semi pro).
If ur good with solder build (EXPERIMENT) with filters traps and even tuned rf filters ar the offenfind radio/tv/etc. www.arrl.* (*=com or org) will have links books etc. Also one ac bus bar for my little studio. Hetween studios henry eng.ati and some other common dist amps help. The dis amps are ballanced and work in 50kw am and fm sites. Foil sheilds a must. Radio Shake has short 4 wilre with foil sheild. My trash bag gnd loop eliminators have helped. Take a THICK trash bag cut a 1.5" square with a hole on the center;slip over RCA cable at one end only and EXperiment with which wire to leave grounded or not for lowest hum and rf interferance. I took 2 weekends once and tankfulls of coffee.

Dave
 
I know what you mean. I have a 50kw transmitter locally. Not that close, but it gets into a lot of my electronics. I find that good grounds help a lot. Be especially careful to make sure you electrical system is up to code. The ground is very important.

Another thing you can do if you can solder, is put a lot of 0.01ufd or 0.001ufd capacitors all over the place. Put them across the hot to ground all over the place. The more the merrier, but I would use the 0.001 so that the high frequencies are not effected.

Try these, I've had good luck with this kind of fix.
 
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