It's great to see RFI problem that impact the profits of big firms. Most RFI is generated because firms cut corners and lazy/crony regulators fail to enforce FCC part 15 rules.

Yep, this bit me hard with my NVidia Shield TV. Plug in the portable USB HDD and the remote stopped worked.

Thankfully Kodi streams from SMB shares extremely well.

Exactly. In many devices, including switching supplies, a bit of attention (and a few very low-cost parts) will bring the devices into compliance. RFI suppression steps are in the data sheet / example circuit for nearly all components used in switching supplies, FWIW.

But just as firms want to be able to import steaks that have been made from cattle raised near polluted foreign rivers, firms import power supplies made with RFI-suppression parts omitted because someone along the way wants that $0.15 as profit and US regulators don't care.

Incidentally, a law was passed fairly recently that allows agricultural firms to remove information about where food items were produced, so quite possibly the steaks we eat will soon be made from cows who drink the water runoff from the polluting factories that make the low quality switching supplies.

Our "first world" environmental regulations (food quality, air and water quality, RF noise floor) are only as good as our regulation of imported products that commit fraud by selling products that do not comply. By failing to enforce these laws, US regulators have helped foreign firms cheat their way into the US market, putting US firms out of business and harming consumers indirectly by polluting their environment.

I'm not arguing that all of those regulations make sense, just that it is silly to have laws that we don't enforce when the health consequences and RFI consequences harm everyone.

Got it. Your first post made it sound like big, lazy firms were the problem. Sounds like what you're really talking about is cheap imported stuff and a lack of enforcement.

No, but for a few minutes it hit 1000rpm

Both of mine are Intel-branded, I forget which models. (They're in a box of things I've been too lazy to try to sell.)

I really love the form factor - about four of these would replace close to a kW-worth of hardware I currently run, and could hide in a closet. Maybe I should try again with known-good versions.

A drill bit for wood... for drilling through walls? Wat?

We just leave all our doors open!

This is a great example of an Apple-style solution vs a Dell style solution.

Just bought a laptop, and now you need to start hacking it up and changing the wifi-card so it doesn't cause interference to itself? What next, break out the soldering iron and go over all the cold joints?

I consider overly frequent false positives to be a severe issue, so yes, I have.

Did you report it to the FCC? I understand if you didn't, as a consumer, and this is not an attack on you. But this kind of thing should be punished, and one of the main ways to do this is to bring this to the attention of the regulating authorities.

We can only keep the spectrum in good shape by, as a producer or designer, test and design to comply. As an importer, require and check certifications on what we import. As a consumer, report when we find something being funky. (again, not blaming you)

Change "buzz" to "scream" or "whisper", and this would be a great horror story...

Not meaning to contradict you because most of my experience matches this, but I would really like to get more detail on Apple’s W1 enchanted bluetooth as used in AirPods, which consistently work smoothly through 2 or 3 walls.

You forgot thunderbolt 3...

It’s a legacy restriction - it was just that they banned any radio transmitters, probably originally because older analogue radio transmitters could interfere with the aircraft’s radios and things.

I don’t think there would have ever been any legitimate concern of low-power digital devices like mobile phones causing any problems like coupling into control systems or anything... Digital radios are typically much better filtered and far lower power than analogue radios.

The company I work for makes satellite antennas for ships and large road vehicles, and the only time we’ve had a problem like that was when somebody mounted a 20kW S-band weather radar three metres from our antenna. It just requires a little extra shielding in one module though.

That's an interesting point, although you have to remember airplane mode turns off all radios on the device, not only the Wi-Fi. They probably use it as a "fool-proof" method to prevent any unintentional interference with both current and future wireless devices.

That being said, unofficially I agree, given Wi-Fi is provided on flights now, I'm sure that means you're alright to leave your Wi-Fi radio on. The answer to why shut off all GSM/CDMA, Bluetooth, and GPS radios as well, however, probably predates the high prevalence of all these wireless technologies in a unified device.

There are no FAA regulations regarding phones/electronic devices other than a blanket rule that you can only enable them with the permission of the captain. The rules regarding cellphone use on planes is from the FCC. They don't want tubes full of transceivers broadcasting at max power (phones ramp up power to search for towers where there are none) high above the earth where they can broadcast over the greatest physical area. At 30k+ft this is not a huge concern (too high for a noticeable increase in the noise floor) but in terminal areas they could conceivably tie up bandwidth on every tower in the city. Whether this is a concern with modern cell towers is up for debate however.

Notably, powerline ethernet destroys nearly the entire HF range, from 3 to 30MHz. This isn't just bad for radio hams, it ruins shortwave and some AM radio too.

Oh they do, we just spend it all on our radios ;).

So if users had a small low-pass filter installed at their fuse box it wouldn't be a problem?

Except unless you have some sort of an impedance follower you'll probably just end up attenuating your powerline networking to the point of not working.

The impedance going to all your neighbors is pretty low too, but I don't think the system relies on signals going out that far and echoing back. High frequencies have more of a transmission line model, which is pretty directional. There's free impedance everywhere.

My understanding is that you mostly care about the minor reflections caused by wire junctions in a system like this, and that line headed outside is more or less a signal sink no matter what. It's possible a capacitor would need to be a bit further away than directly at the breaker box, but by the time you reach the pole I'm reasonably confident that absorbing the entire signal with $.50 of components and no inductor would be fine.

Well I think it's a multifaceted issue, but I am not educated on how your home itself contributes to the radiation profile so I left that bit of speculation out.