There is a way to “hear” the potential in different parts of your system. The method for checking audible noise is to take an amplifier and some magnetic field picking sensor. You can use a coil connected to a microphone amplifier. Or you can take an old cassette player, remove the magnetic pickup that reads →
Good grounds do not mean you will not get ground loop noise. The two are completely different balls of wax. No matter how much you sand the surface, no how good your connectors are, no matter how tight it is bolted down, you are still going to have ground loops. Having a ground loop does →
Troubleshooting grounding problems can be difficult at best. Especially on complex automation/instrumentation systems. Use your power system drawing or a system map to document as you go because these problems can be quite complex requiring some logic to figure out. The typical utility DC bus consists of a battery charger, a string of batteries, a →
A Ham’s Guide to RFI, Ferrites, Baluns, and Audio Interfacing is an interesting tutorial on understanding and solving RF interference problems. To solve interference problems, we must understand them. The document describes many EMC issues well. Almost all RFI problems we describe as “RF in the shack” have pin 1 problems as their root cause! →
Renowned audio design guru Douglas Self has published many audio related articles and books. Some of them can be read on the web. Self on Audio book consists of collected works from 30 years of magazine writing: all the classic preamplifier and power amplifier designs. This is really worth to read collection of articles to →
I really like those electronics manufacturers that have the schematics of their devices on their data-sheets or manuals down-loadable from their site. Those schematics can aid in deciding if the equipment is well built, help in repair, designing possible modification and can be aid when you need to make your own designs that have similar →
I received this kind of mail some time ago (part of the mail posted here with the permission from the writer): “His cable stopped working so he called the cable company. The cable guy unhooked the coaxial from the main box. After he unhooked the coax he struck it on the side of the amplifier →
Star-quad design is sometimes quite a bit of talked about cable type. When I saw Star-Quad Cables and Double-Blind Testing posting at Controlgeek blog I decided that it would be a good idea to write something about them. Several companies use a quad configuration in their balanced cables instead of a twisted pair; Canare calls →
Grounding Complications is a very informative 28 slide set from PowerCET. It worth to read for everybody working with ground loops and electrical wiring. The slide set concentrates on following issues: Sensitive Equipment, Isolated grounding and Supplemental grounds. The slide set tells about wiring practices in use in USA, but there are also general information →
Allen Avionics Audio Isolation Transformers page describes the typical ground loop problem situation with the following drawing: If you want to do the ground loop elimination in audio path, you have to cut the galvanic connection but pass the whole audio range. The simplest and most common way to do the isolation is use audio →