I used to travel to Malaysia quite often on business, and one of the guys who worked for me there as an ex-pat in Kuala Lumpur had gotten a 9M2 license. So I went over to his apartment one evening with the intention of working some 40m CW as a guest op, but the background noise was a horrendous scratchy buzz that ran at least S9+30. When I went outside to look around I could see why. Malaysia gets a lot of rain, things are wet much of the time, and back then (at least 30 years ago) many of the electrical insulators on the overhead power lines were dirty with pollution. I could see constant arcing across dozens of insulators.
I'm retired now and live on a reasonably quiet semi-rural hillside, and !sometimes! on a quiet evening my QRN level on 160m is down below S2 even on my Inverted-L. Counting my blessings ...
73 Dave AB7E On 9/10/2020 2:17 PM, Tony Estep wrote:
====================== Well, here's the flip side. My old qth was noisy enough, but the real eye-opener came when I toted my KX3 to Hyderabad, India a few years ago. I was teaching at the Indian School of Business and living in the faculty apartments, and I had brought the KX3 along expecting to hear a bunch of call-signs that would sound exotic to a midwestern Yank. So I strung up a wire around the walls of my living room, up near the ceiling, and laid a counterpoise out along the floor. Donning my headphones I switched it on, looking forward to an evening of entertainment as I tuned 20 CW. Zowie! What a cacophony of squeals, buzzes, crashes, honks and toots, burps, whistles and grinds. The S-meter jumped up to about S9+10 and stuck there. Nowhere on the band, it seemed, was there a slot wide enough for a signal to peep through. Finally I was able to discern a little peep half-buried beneath the layers of trash, a lonely VU2 calling CQ. I answered him, but of course to no avail. On a later night I heard a few words from a QSO between a local ham and a VR2 in Hong Kong, and that was the sum total of my ham experience while there. Where were the noises coming from? I dunno -- from everywhere, it sounded like. 73, Tony KT0NY
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