The Importance of a Good Ground
For amateur radio equipment you learn that grounding is important. For antennae you learn that grounding is important. One area we don’t think too much about though is grounding of our OTHER equipment. For several years I’ve had reception annoyances in certain AM ranges as well as shortwave ranges. It’s the familiar 60 hertz buzz that is AC power, but I always had a hard time tracking it down. The same was true of our land line phone. The wired handset always had a buzz on it (unless the power was out. It didn’t seem to matter which items I selectively unplugged.) The wireless phone seemed mostly clear usually. But recently that problem has disappeared. Why?
Well in the fall we added a room which radically changed the layout of our house. Our old living room area had the tv, cable box (with ups), dvd player, vcr as well as a cable amplifier, cable modem and my computer (with ups). Our new living room area was the home for most of those with the exception of my computer which went on the adjacent wall where we had to add a new power outlet. After the move, the buzz was gone on the phone, gone on the AM radio, gone on the shortwave.
The secret? grounding. I know the new outlets were properly grounded. The old outlets, well they have a three prong plug so the assumption was that they were grounded, but in reality they had just had retrofit plugs installed and the grounds were open. I suspect the cable box may have been the greatest culprit given that there should be so much rf content in the cable line. Now, there are a few outlets in the house that HAVE had a good ground run to them. After the amazing pre/post re-arranging difference I spent some time in the attic investigating cable runs AND I tested the outlet with one of those cheap outlet testers that you can find at the hardware store.
It’s important that you don’t try to solve this kind of problem unless you’re qualified to do electrical work, but if you are constantly chased by 60 hz buzz… get an outlet tester and start planning which outlets may need an electricians attention.
