Exercise Equipment RFI Kits
Does the operation of a treadmill or your exercise equipment wipe out your radio receiver reception? We have heard cases where the treadmill from a neighbor’s house wiped out the ham radio receiver reception from 2-30 Mhz! The treadmill source was finally isolated to a variable speed motor power supply that was injecting RFI into the AC wiring of the house and the AC wiring was acting as a transmitting antenna broadcasting the signal to the entire neighborhood. The case was difficult to track down since the broadband RFI interference only occurred at 7-8 pm each nite when the neighbor used the treadmill. As with all RFI cases the sequence is similar: Find the Source, Choke the Path, Protect the Victim.
Once the source was identified, a simple solution was to choke off the transmitting antenna with a AC line choke shown below which eliminated the interference problem to the ham receiver:
Testimonials
F400-31 AC Power Cord Choke completely cured the RFI problem I had with my wife’s treadmill. Now I can hear the weak signals!
4:1 impedance transformers (Baluns and Unun configurations) are available in kit form or assembled form in a weatherproof Current Unun and Balun Enclosure which we call CUBE Baluns™ and CUBE Ununs™. All 4:1 impedance transformers use ferrite cores and the kit forms can be configured as a balun with balanced output of 200 ohms or as ununs with one side grounded.
4:1 baluns are designed for 50 ohm unbalanced (coax) input to 200 ohm output (either balanced or with one side grounded).
4:1 Baluns are useful between balanced lines for center fed Zepps, Off-center fed (OCF) dipoles with coax, G5RV antennas, full wave loops, NVIS dipoles that are close to ground and have impedance levels near 200 ohms or high impedance feeds for log periodic beams.
4:1 ununs are useful between coax and vertical antennas, monopole verticals or long wires with load impedances near 200 ohms.