Phone line buzzing
For quite some time our land line phone has had an annoying buzz on it. (The wired extension, the cordless is fine.) When the power is out, no buzz so I know it’s something in the house I just haven’t tracked exactly what is causing the buzz. However, as I was studying for the amateur radio tests one of the things that I learned was that some phones aren’t adequately shielded against rfi (radio frequency interference) (no kidding…) and found some suggestions for dealing with it. One very highly rated filter is made by a place called k-y filters. I’ve seen some people claim for really bad buzzing to try two filters in line.
It’s worth noting that some phone line filters may be bad for dsl compatibility - read the recommendations of the filter maker. And if you want to build it yourself you’ll need to get some ferrite toroids… etc.
Personally, I’ve long suspected our cable box as being the source of the interference on the phone line (it’s about 4-5 feet away and causes an obnoxious hum on a radio within 3 feet. What makes it worse, is it’s a motorola digital cable box that forgets it’s identity when unplugged and takes about 30-45 minutes to redownload everything from charter. Part of the problem is we’ve got the parental lock enabled and so, when it forgets scheduling information EVERYTHING is blocked and requires the code. (Oh yes, but can’t you go in and disable it? Even the config menu is unavailable for a period of time after a power outage which is why it’s now on a battery backup which likely adds more to the buzz.)
I’ve been tempted to build a faraday cage of sorts for it, but don’t know how I’d keep it ventilated.
