Yeah, I hear ya; it's a PITA of multiple flavors. Either the PITA of figuring out mounting hardware (already done with the T9 blub) or the PITA of disassembly so you can can mod it. The PITA of building a civilized power supply for it is of course just the chocolatey coating on top of that PITA...
In ALL HONESTY... to me it's not worth the hassle unless you're retrofitting a swingarm magnifier; for "just a light" I'd scour eBay for a decent old swingarm lamp and put a nice, quiet 70w Halogen blub in it.
mnem
Unfortunately, this little experiment demonstrates why trying to use an amateur band radio in my dense urban neighborhood is increasingly frustrating. My neighbors, wishing to save money and do their bit to fight climate change are installing lights like the one I just tested in bulb and ring and strip form by the hundreds. The street lights are LEDs. The stop lights are LEDs. And every single one of them has a noisy, unfiltered and unshielded SMPS built into them, adding to the background noise level. It is a losing battle. I imagine that, in another four or five years, the bands under 30MHz will be unusable.
It is a lot like what's happened to the night sky in so many of my favorite haunts over the last twenty years and it makes me sad.
This is possibly controversial I know but I suspect this is a function of a poorly designed receivers and antenna choice more than the band conditions and noise as such.
I can get a tidy copy on a below S1 CW signal like its in the next room after spending two years arguing with noise in the middle of London which is rammed with the worst kind of RFI all in one place. The only things I changed were my antenna, RX and power source.
If it were only my own incompetence or cheap gear, rather than conditions, BD, if only. But given the radios I am using, and the several years invested in tracking down, examining, and removing internal and external noise sources, building and installing chokes and filters, and hardening my operating position, it probably isn't.
edit: I realized that the above sounds defensive or snarkish or both. I actually do mean what I said... When something doesn't work the way I expect it to work, I assume some combination of (a) I am using the wrong method, (b) I am using the wrong equipment, (c) I don't understand what is actually happening, (d) I have introduced the problem into an otherwise working system.
Yes I had the same problem but I took a different approach. Rather than curing the noise I tried to work out how I was going to live with it. I resigned myself to portable operating only for a bit with that and the neighbour issues. I built two receivers from scratch to play with ideas and nailed it in the end.
This ended up like this:
1. Get rid of general coverage RX and get a ham bands only RX with narrow band pass filters. This stopped the default position of the receiver being overloaded all the time.
2. Get RX with higher dynamic range and better gain distribution. This improved in band noise performance.
3. Stop using a poorly matched compromise antenna with an AMU and build something which is near 1:1 VSWR without an AMU. Choke it properly at the end of the feed so it’s an unbalanced feed only.
4. Run on battery power only.
5. Get some decent in band IF filtering (fortunately that came with the radio)
6. Align the radio myself carefully and optimise filter bandwidth for the bits of the bands of interest to me (ie I stay at the bottom end of 40m so I have the filter set low to get rid of a chunk of China radio international on 7205).
7. Buy some coax which actually had some braid around it
My antenna is 30 feet away from LED street lights which literally hammered me before. Now I can copy an S1 CW without any issues like its in the next room. SSB is marginally worse as always but usable now.
I did a couple of YT videos (now deleted) a while back which can be a before and after comparison. I will re-up them later. The difference is startling.