What surprised me was the distance a single LED light bulb can throw its inteference. Every light bulb in our farm house is an LED. I replaced all of the incandescent bulbs some time ago to reduce our electric bill. Keeping the lights in my shack/shop off when I'm on the radio knocked the receive noise way down. But I noticed that when I'm on the air at night, my receive noise went from zero to 1-2 S-units.
I asked my wife to turn off the main breaker for the house, and the S-meter returned to zero. To make a long story short, it turned out that our front porch lights were generating the noise. Every bulb in the house is a 9 watt LEDer, EXCEPT the front porch lights which are 20 watters. I changed them out to a different brand and problem solved. My antenna is a good 70 meters from the house so the 4 bulbs on the front porch were generating a lot of noise. I'm glad we don't have any close neighbors because if we did I'm certain their lights would interfere with my receive too. Sometimes new technology is a PITA.
- J.J. 399