A strange problem linking to Flex on 20 and 30 meters

rssutton9

My Flex 6400 is in a workshop about 50m from my second floor apartment in a retirement community. The shop has no internet, so I installed a Ubiquiti bridge from the apartment to the shop. My computer is wired to an ASUS router in the apartment, to the bridge hanging outside the window. On all bands except 20 and 30 the network readings from Flex show excellent with latency < 7, The router and bridge report bandwidth. Key CW on 30m with power than 20 watts and the radio freezes up for about 2 seconds. The network then drops to a red bar and takes about another 2 seconds to come up to full power. Even stranger: if I run the system from a laptop in the shop, using the same LAN but on the other end of the bridge, there is no problem at all. I've also put a Faraday shield around a dummy load directly connected to the Flex; the problem remains on 20 and 30m. I'm convinced the problem is not the Flex, but the bridge/router. I turned off the 5G setting on the router, thinking it might be interfering with the 5190MHz bridge frequency. It made no difference to the 20 and 30 meter problem. I'm at a loss as to how next to attack the problem and open to all suggestions. I've tried offering a sacrifice of roadkill to the computer gods, to no avail. Help.

Stan KD8KBX

Ha Gei

Stan,

I am pretty sure, the Ubiquity is beeing influenced by RFI. You migh try a different brand of bridge. For the distance i would even consider one of these 6x6 cm small bridges to work. I use such at work without issues.

rssutton9

Ha,

Thank you for your suggestion. I will try that if I can't get anything else to fix it.

Stan

Mike-VA3MW

I would add 2 or 3 Mix 43 or Mix 31 chokes to the LAN cables and the DC power cable for the bridge equipment.

Every piece of cable can become an antenna if the right conditions are met.

73

Mike VE3CKO

Go with what Mike says, but to add to it, loop the excess DC power cable at least 4 times. I loop the CAT5 cable a couple of times as well, it excess and just sitting there susceptible to RFI.