I am NOT an expert not even close to be one just have some little experience with this subject.

Noice level, lots of different words can be used for this.

The main thing to remember is that most of the noise you will receive will be your own man made noise.

Yes I’m lucky, living in an area on the countryside so my noise level is low from the start.

If you read the other parts of this site you will know I was not always that lucky.

I lived in different places some were high in noise so I know the difference and it can be a hard battle sometimes.

I have many friends with the same hobby and sometimes they need my help.

Before going to help them the first thing I ask, do you have a good grounding system in the shack?

If the answer is no, I said to them let’s start with the beginning and try to make a good ground for your station.

After that question I start with some other questions as you will see on this part of the site.

Ground

 I’m sorry for the other language speaking people but the illustration is in Dutch.

As you can see there are some chokes. The green line in the shack is a simple coper water pipe.

The grounding of the house is connected to the grounding of the shack but there are some chokes on. The safety ground of the sockets also has a choke. All cables are 16mm² of thickness.

Grounding equipment

Again some chokes are used, the red box is the safety ground. All equipment that go’s to the sockets has an choke on them and before you go to your station ground there is another choke in use.

All cables again are 16mm².

As you can see on the RF ground there are NO chokes.

All equipment has to be grounded, on the larger equipment you need to use at least 16mm², the smaller equipment will be with 6mm² cable. Don’t forget the negative of the power supply wil be grounded also.

All has to be grounded, don’t forget Tower, rotor, radials, ………. They all connected to the stations ground. Ground when possible with the shortest possible cable, if  a cable is longer than 30 meter choke it twice, use big grounding cables if possible.

Chokes and ground on antennas

The yellow lines are grounding cables, the blue lines are coaxial cables and the black cable is the coax for the dummy load.

When possible try to buried your coaxial and other cables into the ground.

As you can see its again in Dutch, the antenna switch has a choke at the coax from the shack to the switch. The switch can be grounded when not in use (automatic), the coaxial cables to the antennas has a choke at the feed point.

All antennas are connected to the grounding of the stations ground with the use of a choke again.

Control cables

All control cables at my place are choked again.

The cables are longer than 30m so twice, one before entering my shack and one in the barn.

Mains filters

Some operators are using mains filter to all of the equipment in the shack.

I decided to use 1 at the entrance of the shack, all other equipment are been tested to make sure that they don’t produce any noise on the receiver.

Some final words