So by now, RC regulars should know our house is haunted with phantom RF signals. Our ceiling fan turns on by itself. Wi-Fi barely goes 35 feet ...

Here's a strange one. I have had three different cell phones on two different services (AT&T and Verizon) and they all cut out at a certain area over my desk -- an area of maybe 2x2 feet.

(NO, haven't gone through with spectrum analyzer but need to do that.)

OK ... go.

Turn off breakers for your lights / fans and test cell signals again. Cheap dimmers or fans could be source of RF leakage.

House was built on top of Indian burial grounds?


Time to move to SA before some REALLY bad stuff happens.... ;-)

change ceiling fan code set?

Do the breaker trick.

We had a client with a compressor going out in his AC unit. It was blasting RF like crazy. We spent two days tracking, replacing parts, etc.

End of the second day, I said "hell with it" and started shutting off breakers, as soon as I killed that AC unit, it ALL stopped. Called in the AC guy, he checked the unit, sure enough, it was going bad.

Weird, weird, weird......

Hire a professional and pay them.

A client in the hills above UCLA used to have his DirecTV signal modulated onto channel 17 and mixed into his antenna signal. He could then get it on every TV. This was in the days of analog-only channels.

He called to say the signal disappeared every night, then was back on in the morning. I couldn't get there right away so I asked him to keep the TVs on to see if it stopped at the same time every night.

After two nights he concluded it died at exactly the same time on both of those days. I asked him if he had anything on a timer.

He found that one of the PAR spotlights that came on at that time of day, lighting up the front garden, made a buzzing noise. He took it out and the problem went away.

Incandescent bulb buzzes audibly, kills UHF channel 17. Right.

Another client's Sony receiver would not change volume when the cable box was on channel fifty-something. You could turn it on and off and select inputs, just not change volume.

That's where you should place the coffee pot or the sandwich that you need to keep warm.

And don't worry. The stories I've heard since the sixties about people getting hurt by microwaves (such as man working on DEW line installation stands in microwave beam to keep warm, story from around 1960) are, at least according to snopes. false.

Just wait until Cedia 2017 and ask guys to bring their tools. Should be an easy trade for a day of water toys!

I had a fun one. In one corner of my basement - where I wanted to put my office - I had a big problem. With CRT computer monitors... the image would SHAKE badly. Like shimmy side to side, as if there was some huge magnet nearby trying to degauss it.

I ended up rotating my office with the monitor 180 degrees the other way, about 12 feet from the same spot, where the problem was about 85% reduced. However, I then discovered that if I ran a refresh rate of 85hz or higher, the unstable image would steady up and not shake.

Thankfully not a problem with LCDs!

Daniel,
you really should have pursued the cause of this!

I've seen a half-inch cable jump more than an inch when power was turned on or off, and there must have been one HELL of a current flow near your problem area.

I really did spend a lot of time trying to track that one down. Checked wiring in walls and ceiling, objects in the adjacent room... nothing made sense. No other structures nearby either. The house's electrical panel isn't too far away, but it's the exact same distance from what ended up being an okay position.

In a completely different part of the basement about 30 feet away, service guys went through 3 Philips 34" CRT televisions trying to get one where the red didn't shift severely along the edges to magenta. Never did get it perfect, but the problem was extremely rotation sensitive - they had to play around with adding magnets while in was in place.

I dunno. Some kind of meteorite buried in the front yard? :-)

Years ago I worked on a home that apparently bad been build more or less on top of a lodestone. At least that was my best guess.

Clients 36 living room CRT TV wouldn't hold the colors, and when I went there to install a satellite, my compass wouldn't read correctly if I got near the house.

I could walk across the yard and the compass would read north as it should but when I walked towards the house, the compass would slowly start moving until it was well off the mark.

After just setting the dish up by eyeballing it we moved the TV to the second floor, I used a degaussing ring on it and it worked fine.

Not sure if anything more was done, but I didn't really want to get into hours and hours of figuring it out.


In my personal house there is a niche in the kitchen for a small TV, and I had a small CRT TV in it. Behind that niche is the lines for the second floor HVAC, HVAC power and HVAC thermostat. Kill that system and the TV would work fine. Power the HVAC on and the TV colors went crazy...

A flat panel found it's way there in short order....

Told you not to move to Cuesta Verde Estates Phase 1....