FCC to Investigate Raised RF Noise Floor

As you say, the problem is lack of "Immunity" in your guitar amp, and not a fault in the transmitters around you. Importantly there is nothing which can be done at the Transmitters to cure your problem. Only better design of your music equipment will fix the problem.

Your claim that "High gain distortion are susceptible due to their nonlinearity" is just wrong. Any electronics can be properly shielded by good design. That your fuzz-pedal misbehaves is due to cheap design.

The topic here is spurious emissions, which are a tiny, tiny percentage of actual wanted transmissions. If your guitar amp is effected by spurious emissions, then it would be totally wiped out by any radio transmissions in your neighbourhood.

If you willfully continue to violate, especially if you've been warned, huge and or daily fines are common.

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Equipment is regulated and you can't sell things that break regulations. If fining the retailer isn't effective or possible, they use the financial system against you and threaten the payment processor.

All of these fines are adequate to pay for enforcement.

When it comes down to it, many of the threats which might annoy the public could just as easily be threats to national security with slight tweaks to frequency. With that, there's no problem getting continued support for enforcement all the way from the top.

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Here are some warnings http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/

Here are some orders http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/rfo/ActAct.html

More noise means a worse signal-to-noise ratio. This means that things that rely on RF may stop working, or not work as well.

But even though we're nowhere near extreme levels, this still causes problems in some areas of the world. I don't remember the specifics, but some train-related communications system where I live uses a part of the spectrum that's apparently very busy. This means the train drivers often have to rely on the civilian cell phone system to communicate, which in an emergency will be absolutely swamped and really hard to use.

The Kessler syndrome is about satellites, once you have an overpopulation they collide, smash into smaller bits, causing more collisions, causing more impacts, until its foolish to launch another satellite to replace the damaged ones because it'll get destroyed immediately and merely create more junk that destroys whats already up there, and launching an armored (military) satellite would just result in more bits of armor destroying more satellites, etc.

Likewise the analogy goes that every receiver needs a certain minimal signal to noise ratio to operate, to demodulate correctly with an acceptable bit error rate. Well, if the noise level goes up your only option is to increase transmitter power level which eats battery and ruins the environment and makes your radio link work, but you just increased the noise level for all the OTHER systems nearby which have to increase their power levels until your system doesn't work, rinse and repeat until nothing works.

A real world historical example is the social media like, CB radio boom of the late 70s. I realize not too many people here are old enough to remember that. But a system that worked well for a modest number of users at a legal and clean 5 watts of transmitter power, suddenly had way too high a density of users, all running illegal noisy 100 watt amplifiers because they wanted to be heard over other illegal noisy 100 watt amplifier users, etc. Eventually the system completely collapsed and all the users left because it didn't work for anyone anymore and CB is in the dustbin of history, pretty much.

In the long run to an end user it would look like in the countryside your bluetooth or wifi or anything else that uses radio will have a very long lasting battery and great range and be pretty reliable although the hardware will be much more expensive than it is now to try and work in the city, but in the city the battery life drops by a significant fraction, everything is slow and unreliable, range drops from across a large room to just a couple inches for bluetooth if it works at all, wifi is unusable in some areas that have hundreds of access points interfering with each other, etc. Some services would simply stop working in a very high noise environment due to high difficulty of increasing transmitter power. No more GPS, broadcast radio, possibly cell phone service, probably no more police/fire radios. The concept of a police car no longer having a usable reliable radio is weird.

Or, literally, the energy is way too low to benefit from it. Sure, the TV might blanket space with a few watts of interference, but going by the law of quadratic decay that's not worth much at distance.

All this noise does is prevent observation of low-energy signals. It does not contribute to a high-energy signal itself. (Goes for both light pollution and RF noise.)

Edit: unless, of course, you mean we can "harvest" this free energy by making our appliances conform to regulations, in which case it's an obvious yes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole#Vector_form [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna#Hertzian_dipole

A problem with all transmitters is they produce out of band signals. Mostly harmonics, but also lesser amounts of other frequencies. And another issue is that receivers only have limited ability to reject out of band signals. A strong out of band signal will reduce your receivers sensitivity. (Difficulty, out of band rejection comes at the expense of ultimate sensitivity, pick your poison)

The problem then is that the amount of energy needed to raise the noise floor is tiny, minuscule. And we have all these devices that all add a tiny amount each, which then adds up to something. If you raise the noise floor a few db it matters a lot, because following reason.

Consider this, if you double the distance from the transmitter, the signal strength drops by ~6db. So if interference reduces your receivers sensitivity from -120db to -114db it cuts the effective range in _half_[1].

[1] It's not quite half because in the real world you have air, trees, and buildings in the way which means your signal drops off faster than the inverse square. Instead the exponent is more like 2.5(outside) to 3.5(inside)

A legal switching power supply in a PC might knock out all AM radio reception on the same desktop. That's because the mfgr installed $5 worth of inductors and bypass capacitors in the power supply input section. So maybe 500 watts output, 4.999 watts of noise gets turned into heat by those interference filters, and 0.001 watts messed up the AM radio on the same desktop.

(edited to add BTW if you think your cheap switching power supply is 99% efficient I have a bridge to sell you... the actual numbers are worse)

The problem is those inductors and capacitors and ferrite cores are $5 of "lost" profit in China, and technically the power supply works with them replaced by pieces of copper wire. So the same 500 watts output, and 5 watts of noise broadcast into the neighborhood. Well, at least its not turned into heat inside the chassis, LOL. The problem is a 5 watt transmitter is going to knock out AM radio for some city blocks in every direction.

In the 30s your average house had like one piece of electronics, probably an old console radio. But now houses are full of electronic junk from China so you're battling pretty much everyone who wants to get the lowest priced XYZ from walmart. Like some forms of pollution, RF interference is virtually impossible to clean up and the biggest violators have a significant payoff, higher profits at the factory and cheaper products on the shelf, or some continuum along that spectrum anyway.

A good analogy would be trying to organic garden in an urban environment surrounded by pollution and pesticide spraying. You might not be dumping god knows what into your dirt, but your neighbors simply don't care and are constantly spraying or dumping who knows what, and you share the environment so even if per UDSA your dirt is legally organic because YOU didn't mess it up, you still know its a regular toxic brew in there because of your neighbors ...

My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the problem is mostly from unregulated imported electronics that emit all kinds of broadband RF noise as a consequence of being made cheaply.

So no, proliferation of cell phones is only a problem for cell phones (one of the reasons for migrations 2G -> 3G -> 4G). The real problem are other devices transmitting in cell phone spectra effectively DDoS'ing them.

Computers were once big RF emitters, but the FCC cracked down on that successfully in the 1980s. In the early days of personal computing, a Radio Shack TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak would both crash if close. In recent years, most computers got radio receivers for at least WiFi, and thus had to be built well enough not to knock out their own receivers.

Analog TV sets tended to emit loudly at the local oscillator frequency. The UK used to drive around with "television detector" vans to find people who didn't pay their TV tax, which funds the BBC. But tuners quieted down years ago, as they became tiny RF-tight sealed units.

The worst behavior comes from switching power supplies, especially for lighting. The cost pressure is very high. They don't receive, so they have no receiver to protect. Another big source of noise is leaky cable TV systems. Again, since they don't receive, they aren't affected by their own leakage. The cable industry has successfully lobbied to escape tight restrictions on cable system leakage. Those two sources are probably the source of most problems.

Low-cost spectrum analyzers are available, and some are laptop peripherals.[1] There are ones as cheap as $69 on eBay, but the consensus in EDN is that you have to pay a few hundred dollars to get something that produces useful measurements. People who install and maintain WiFi networks in large buildings usually have one. Then you can find what's blithering all over the spectrum.

[1] http://www.edn.com/design/test-and-measurement/4412405/Low-c...

I'd look at things plugged into walls before anything running off a battery.