Andrew Ince: 
 

Hi Mike. I have LED lighting throughout the house but do not experience any HF interference. I am lucky to live in a very rural location so have very low noise levels across the HF bands. Usually less than S1 on the lower HF bands and virtually noise free 20m up. From my understanding much of the noise problems experienced at HF are a result of VDSL broadband and I've deliberately kept ADSL2+ as I have overhead telephone line to the house. Try to keep your aerial away from obvious noise sources as suggested by mapj1 (Mike) and have a well balanced and/or matched feed. I'm sure a good RF earth will help too. I use a linear power supply rather than SMPS but good ones will provide frequency adjustment to eliminate interference from harmonics. If all else fails your plan to use battery power charged from solar will help.

 

Good luck 73

Andy GM0BZS

Hi Andy, you are very fortunate to have such low noise levels. My shack is currently in an upstairs bedroom and I am hoping that moving it out into the garden will improve matters (although the real impetus behind this is that my wife has other uses for the bedroom!).

I opted for FTTC because we are 4.5km from the exchange with aluminium phone lines to the cabinet and ADSL speeds were lousy.

The antenna is an end fed half wave with a common mode choke on the coaxial feeder. It has a static earth rod which is bonded to the MET via an RF choke. I'm planning to have a TT supply to the garden room and connect the antenna to the mains earth rod. I also use a linear PSU for the transceiver.

Mike G8GYW

Andy C: 
 

I tried an experiment by running my hf rig off a battery and knocking off the mains supply to my house to see if there was any reduction in noise on the hf bands. Unfortunately not, though whether some of the issue might have been noise coming in on the mains earth (PME and overhead supply cables) I didn't check. I am also looking at supply options for a future garden shack which will be about 50m away from the house and am seriously thinking about batteries topped up by solar without any mains connection to the house, however this will be right beside a local ground mounted transformer supplying a number of houses in our road. I know the things are supposed to be totally screened but wonder how much ‘noise’ might be escaping from it or the adjacent fuse cabinet.

Andy G1BED

Hi Andy, 50m is certainly a long way to be running a mains cable. Think of all that digging!

Our supply tranformer is 150m from the house and the substation is 220m. The pylon cables (which I presume are 133kV?) run down the middle of our street so with that and VDSL it couldn't be much noisier!

Mike G8GYW