That’s awesome! Congrats!
My first HF contact resulted in the oversensitive arc-fault breakers in my house tripping and cutting off the power to my radio mid contact. Oh well. It was still really cool!
Discussion
Haha yea I’m looking forward to that once I get a base station set up. My only shack option is my office upstairs so grounding is going to be…. sketchy.
I’m doing portable QRP HF only at the moment.
That happened to me as well. It’s a problem they are aware of and have updated on recent updates of circuit breakers. Eaton provided me free upgrades to new arc fault breakers that don’t trip when I tap the CW key.
That’s interesting to know. My breakers are about 6 years old and installed in our house coming up on that old. They’ve been a pain at times not even related to RF triggers. Every once in a long while I’ve got about 8 breakers that will randomly trip. Sometimes multiple times a day. It’s usually an issue during the day during regular working hours which makes me think it’s related to new homes being hooked up to power since our neighborhood is still being built out.
Mine would almost never trip unless I was broadcasting RF on certain frequencies. Apparently that fooled the breaker into thinking it was an arc fault. They’ve improved though so even at 6 years you may want to replace the ones that are tripping if they are arc fault breakers.