Nasty noise on BBC Radio 3 Crystal Palace relay

[Nick_G]

I thought it may have been local electrical hash but it's not; there's a constant regular crackle on the BBC Radio 3 relay from Crystal Palace. Driving around locally it is constant. It sounds like it's picking up a lot of electrical noise on 91.3 and re-broadcasting it.

Whatever the cause it really is pretty awful. I don't know if any BBC engineers read this forum but you never know.

[Resurrection Man]

I thought it may have been local electrical hash but it's not; there's a constant regular crackle on the BBC Radio 3 relay from Crystal Palace. Driving around locally it is constant. It sounds like it's picking up a lot of electrical noise on 91.3 and re-broadcasting it.

Whatever the cause it really is pretty awful. I don't know if any BBC engineers read this forum but you never know.

That would have been those folk at Digital Radio UK getting desperate and messing up the FM !

[Nick_G]

Ha ha that was a good one!

Something very odd about this noise: it is present on the car radio driving around here, and it doesn't matter whether the engine is on or off, so presumably it isn't coming from the car's electrics. However, it isn't present on my tuners here. Could it be because the interference is vertically polarised, and so is being rejected by my horizontal Yagi? Or could it be some sort of interference from within the car? It's odd that it is only affecting 91.0 MHz.

[Ferretfancy]

I used to get this problem in the mornings between 10am and noon, and had my tuner serviced because I noticed that the signal strength was varying. After the fix all was well, but the problem referred to here seems different. In the last couple of days I've been getting intermittent crackles on FM from Crystal Palace, but with no signal level fluctuations. The noise is mostly heard on the left channel. If i listen to In Tune later in the day, it does not appear. I suspect that there may be some sort of engineering maintenance going on.
This raises another point. In the past there were broadcast apologies when transmission failures occurred, but this is no longer the case since the BBC outsourced the service. You used to be able to ring BBC Engineering enquires if you needed advice, but that isn't possible now. I suppose there is an online service, but this tends to only give answers to generalised enquires, not specifics.

Now that I know that my tuner is not to blame, I'll sit this one out and see what happens.

[Ferretfancy]

I thought it may have been local electrical hash but it's not; there's a constant regular crackle on the BBC Radio 3 relay from Crystal Palace. Driving around locally it is constant. It sounds like it's picking up a lot of electrical noise on 91.3 and re-broadcasting it.

Whatever the cause it really is pretty awful. I don't know if any BBC engineers read this forum but you never know.

Nick

Since I last posted, I thought I'd check again, as the problem was bad this morning. I found that the noise disappeared completely if I retuned onto 91.30 instead of 91.00. I've no idea why, but it's fine for me, so it might be worth a try.

Ferret