Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Radio signals


380 motor
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
Once upon a time we put a motor in the Blue Boat. On the water the model wouldn’t respond properly to the controls with no speed control to speak of, or at least what little there was came in bursts. That was when I learnt about motor suppression.

Basically all motors generate radio signals as they run. These can be strong enough to swamp the signals from the transmitter. Indeed, running a model railway locomotive near a TV aerial wire is enough to kill the weak digital signal and ruin the telly picture. This is not A Good Thing as far as the rest of the household is concerned.

Suppression is a well-documented subject. You can even buy a kit to do the job. Mine came from, Robbie and contains three capacitors. Two are soldered from the case to each terminal and a third between the two terminals. Apparently this is enough to do the job.

Easy to do, although cleaning the area of the case to be soldered is worth the effort, lets just hope it works.

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