Jonathan, K6ATO recently e-mailed me:
On a recent 2m SSB net, I accidentally discovered that my dash cam was generating a world of RFI that would entirely swamp out all but the strongest signals (e.g. repeaters) — this RFI was not limited to one model. I made a video about this since it seemed of general interest.
I was getting amazingly poor performance on what should have been a decent auto antenna…. It was only because I parked the car and the camera shut off 30s after the ignition was killed that I figured it out. Total pain!
The video demonstrates the impact of the dashcam RFI on a QSO, a bit of debugging using some test equipment, and tests of three separate dashcams:
- REXING V1 2.4 (very very bad)
- DEXORS X5 (pretty bad)
- XF TIMES 3.0″ (ok)