Hi everyone,
I'm facing a kind-of-weird problem. I just moved into a shared new office building and I'm having some trouble with RF noise that my test equipment happily picks up.
The long story is that I was just tracking down some issues in the power supply of a product we're currently designing. During the measurements I noticed spikes all over the place overlaying the expected signals. After eliminating all causes that could be related to the DUT I tracked down the issue to what seemingly is one of my neighbour's powerline/PCL adapter modulating on the main's earth causing some weird trouble.
Basically the HomePlug AV1200 standard introduced the possibility to use the earth/ground wire for MIMO purposes. They didn't think or didn't worry about people relying on a clean earth apparently.
So while I understand how to filter RF noise on hot and neutral I have no clue how to deal with this issue
Any clue?
The attached trace is from a Micsig handheld scope's probe compensation generator, just with added mains earth reference. Having the scope floating the traces go back to normal.
P.S.: I hope I'm posting this in the right section