RF problem with RB-1080

[joetama]

So it started maybe this morning a faint noise coming through both of my main speakers. I thought it was the voices again until I realized it was an FM radio station. After scanning the spectrum I found the station matches 107.1 FM here in Cincinnati. It is so clear I could hear the song playing, the pitch and tone of the singers, and could almost make out what the DJ was saying by putting my ear next to the tweeter. So, I broke out the O-Scope and started disconnecting things to find what piece of equipment or cable was introducing the RF noise.

Well, I am down to a RB-1080 with nothing connected to it except speakers and I still have the noise. I've tried changing the source of power from directly to the wall, though a conditioner, though a couple of conditioners. I've even switched out power cables in case that was the problem, but not luck. After doing a bit of investigation the screwed up thing is it isn't just the RB-1080. I recently purchased a Yamaha RX-V665 for HDMI decoding and the damn radio station is coming though the center channel too which is driven by the amp in the RX-V665. It is also found on the outputs of my Moon P3 preamp.

I'm at a loss here. I've even tried to make a grounded shield out of aluminum foil but I can't get the interference to go away. Oddly enough you can hear the station when you tune to 106.3 and 107.9 MHz on a receiver as well. I don't have my spectrum analyzer anymore so I can't view the spike to see if its extremely dirty, but I have a serious hunch that it is. The signal has to be rather strong to be picked up in my amp, pre-amp, and receiver!

Anyway does anyone have any suggestions or words of wisdom?

[windshear]

All things considered, it sounds like you might be very close to the transmitter or a repeater. So strong it is bleeding into the electronics. Maybe inform the FCC ? If you have access to a spectrum analyser , it would definately give you a heads up, before you have an oops moment.

[joetama]

With serious cases of interference, I'm talking public safety, I've seen the FCC drag their feet and never show up and they typically don't care about 'consumer' problems anymore. Apparently they are too busy trying to figure out who they can reclaim spectrum from to sell to the highest bidder. LOL

Anyway, searching through the FCC database the transmitter is about 10-15 miles away by my best guess and should be operating at 2.8 kW ERP. But then again I've actually never seen RF that wasn't co-located do this which is screwing with my mind and making me think it might not be totally the fault of this station.

The only thing I can figure is about 3 TV stations and a few FM stations along with VHF paging (which is almost always nasty), UHF systems, 800 Data links, and a whole boat load of other RF BS is circling me with in about 1.5-2 miles. So I'm betting some mixing is going on and driving an RF shitstorm right into my living room. I've got some ideas but it requires a trip to Parts Express which I don't know if I'll do or not. I miss MCM having a store front.

I'm going to play with it more tomorrow to see if I can figure something out. From screwing with it tonight I did figure out how to make it worse and how to tune it a bit. So I'm hoping if I think about it I can use this to make it all go away. At one point it was louder coming through my speakers (with no pre-amp just amplifier) than the level I had set on my little FM radio.