Did you miss a trick there?
Could you have got them to disconnect it at the far end, then you could’ve got yourself an end fed antenna a decent height off the ground?
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Nice one!
Actually they didn’t even climb the poles. They removed it from my house, cut it short and taped the cut end to the intermediate pole at about head height. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still had dial tone on it, albeit with no service.
Martyn
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That would depend whether or not they redeployed the line card at the exchange end. But probably not as they must have boxes of unused ones from customers who migrated to FTTP.
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OpenReach and ZZooMM were apparently having a race to fit fibre here. All underground until the distribution pole - then overhead, joining all the existing copper. ZZooMM do not seem to have had enough subscribers - we get a letter about monthly suggesting that we are missing out. Our fibre to the cabinet seems quite fast enough BUT:-
Most of the time 80m above 3.52 MHz is s9 noise. I prepared to investigate and did not even leave the house as the wire through the front porch was apparently responsible 
My battery charger is s9 over the 40m band and something wipes the whole of 20m from time to time. Not inconvenient enough to be worth investigating yet but not tamed at all by the twin aerial device.
73,
Rod
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Possibly. However, my gut feeling is that it’s simply cheaper to use the existing poles and string the fibre overhead, especially as we’re at the end of the line…
Same here. Looks a bit like they’re digging trenches to bury fibre only where they absolutely have to, and stringing fibre between existing poles where they can. The next road over has more buried fibre than the one I’m on, but it also has a fair bit of overhead electricity cabling, which probably makes working on the telephone poles a little trickier…
Havn’t had anything from GigaClear in quite a while.
RF noise here is a whole lot lower than it used to be when I lived south east of London. It helps that my antennas are as far from the houses around here as I could get them. I think it also helps that I’m quite a way from the *DSL cabinet, though *DSL will only sync at about 30 down and 6.5 up as a result of the line length. Back in the south east, the cabinet was on the street no more than 20 yards from my house, and the *DSL interference there was pretty grim.
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Hi Rod,
That seems to be the FTTC “Fibre to the cabinet” option that we’ve had here in the village for the last eight years or so. Luckily here all copper telephone cables have been underground for the last thirty years or more. We were supposed to have FTTH (Fibre to the Home) 2-3 years ago but COVID messed that up and we are still waiting - I “ought” to get it by April on the latest prediction. At the moment I have a Hybrid modem with LTE (4G) and ADSL. It all went VOIP on that system about 4 years ago.
So even with VDSL for the run from the road to houses, I’ve been lucky here, that the underground cables have not raised the noise floor.
73 Ed.
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You’re no doubt joking although it’s a nice idea.
On my road the overhead AC mains cables run just above the telephone cables on the same poles. I understand that Power Line Communications (PLC) digital data is sent through the mains and the coupling between the two sets of cables must be very high, leading to awful RFI on HF.
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A few years ago I sorted out a few noisy power supplies in the house. For a while I didn’t operate from home much and then started to try chasing but found it incredibly difficult due to the noise levels. Then I discovered that the printer in the office/shack was responsible for a lot of the noise. I must have bought it after originally checking for noise sources in the house. So it’s well worth checking - someone else in the house might have got a new phone charger or similar that’s really noisy. Or perhaps a device has just started making noise.
I don’t think the noise here is too bad, but I generally only chase on 20m as the noise is higher on other bands. We have Virgin fibre and Openreach lines are underground so VDSL isn’t too bad. The neighbours have had solar panels fitted but they don’t appear to be noisy. One future project is to try a receive antenna down the garden to see if it helps. But my main operating is as a SOTA activator where the noise is usually so low I’m not sure if the receiver is working!
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I measured the (high) background noise on all bands 160m to 6m in my outside shack. Then I cut the AC power to the entire house and did the measurements again with the FT857 powered by battery. No change to the readings. So, my household devices and circuits weren’t to blame.
I walked around the house, the street and near my neighbours’ houses listening to a Sony MW/SW radio tuned to a blank AM-mode MW frequency, and the noise peaked standing under the overhead power & telephone lines and went up dramatically standing next to the telegraph pole fronting my property.
After suffering a continuous 4s cyclic clicking sound on 6m I drove round the village then out into rural countryside and into the next village listening to my FT817 on 6m SSB with 6m whip on car roof. Weird noises heard anywhere near houses or overhead cables but completely quiet away from both.
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Electric fence?
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Hah! The nearest one is at least 500m away (as the crow flies) and is rarely on (even when the cows are there). In any case, I read that the pulse repetition rate is normally about 1s. I also read, In normal operation, where the system is properly earthed, an electric fence should not cause interference to television or radio reception.
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It looks like you were right after all [I must have taken my cynic’s hat off momentarily when I read BT’s original statement regarding the PSTN switch-off date].
BT has reported that the BT switch off date for ISDN and PSTN services has been extended to 31st January 2027. BT has announced that it has delayed the switch from physical copper-based landlines to internet-based services across the UK until 2027 – 2 years later than originally planned.
So, we’ll have to grin and bear the RF noise from them an extra two years.
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Hi Andy,
Sorry, I haven’t read the complete BT report (the linked report is to a fibre Internet provider) but do you interpret this to mean that British Telecom is dropping being a physical communications supplier in the UK? Suggesting they may only provide VOIP services across someone else’s network - such as TelGroup?
I would have thought they would be switching from copper to fibre optic medium but remaining the physical connection provider.
By the way, IP telephony also runs over old copper DSL (ADSL or VDSL) lines very well. Our “normal phone line” here runs IP over the copper line and then uses ATAs in the router to be able to connect old POTS handsets, DECT or IP phones to the system, while also supplying a data connection as a Hybrid to an LTE link.
.
73 Ed.
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Hi Ed, No, to your first paragraph, yes, to your above quoted sentence.
If you’ve not read the thread from the start, we’ve been discussing how much longer [in the UK] we will have to suffer RFI from digital traffic via overhead street cables.
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Here on the southern end of the Cotswolds, GigaClear apparently have fibre strung as far as the pole in the road outside my house, but it seems we might have to wait for a while for OpenReach to get their FTTP sorted this far. All I can get from the OpenReach site is a page extolling the virtues of FTTP with a “Keep me updated” button should I want any more spam, but not a hint of time scales…
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Same here, no sign of OpenReach upgrading our village to FTTP. But GigaClear did come through on their promise (about 9 months from first digging to service live) and I’m now on a symmetric 500Mbps up & down for £20 per month (look for the intoductory offer) and an extra £2 a month for a static IP address. We’ve had a couple of outages but apart from that its been great. Service is IPv4 presented as DHCP over 1G ethernet, they are happy for you to plugin your own router if you prefer.
So pleased to have ditched VDSL and I can now transmit without the internet dropping out 
Jonathan
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The rollout of FTTP / FTTH across Germany stepped into high gear in the Spring of this year with roads and gardens being ripped up throughout the country. Most of the planned installations were forecast to be completed 2 years or more ago but of course, COVID followed by material shortages meant that everything went on hold, now they are going at it “gangbusters” - that being said, as the feeder tubes, that the glass fibre will be literally “shot” down, have to go in first complete villages or town suburbs are being completed first and only when that is all finished and all the holes filled in again, does the next team come along to install the fibre and connect up the actual networking equipment. In short, I expect to get my FTTH connection by this Christmas, 3 years late.
The earlier Fibre to the street cabinet and then VDSL to the home will be decommissioned at the same time since the old and new Infrastructure (at least where I live) are owned by the same company. Luckily, the existing system has all connections underground - no overhead telephone wires and I have not had any VDSL interference here.
73 Ed.
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Amazing Ed… I think this is the only thing that Boris Johnson, our former and much discredited Prime Minister achieved after promising it in the Conservatives 2019 manifesto. This is the only thing they achieved in my opinion - fibre to the property, FTTP.
100s of thousands if not milliions in the UK, have now got it if they want it. Even in small North Yorkshire Market Towns like my own. It only costs a few pounds more each month. Worth every penny, not to be able to knock out the internet whenever I transmitted on the 60m band, despite loads of ferrite, I could not stop it. An instant cure was once when we got FTTP in October 2022 - we had VDSL before that.
The amazing thing is, from what you say, that the UK is ahead of Germany on this issue.
73 from the DM/BW/BM area where I now am…
DL/G4OBK/P
PS Open Reach (or their contractors) are now installing fibre overhead where there aren’t the ducts in the footpaths to take it)
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GigaClear have been doing that round here, including some long stretches across roads where there were previously no lines. I’m sure it’s cheaper and less disruptive, but…
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… but here in Storm Arwen the ice stuck to it and it stretched and sagged, which was Ok until the snowplough snapped it… … It took them about 6 weeks to restore it
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