I recently had two solar Farm engineers, help me put my solar panels my new solar panels in and I purchased a bunch of Victron gear since I was updating the panels to 585 W JINKO Neo tiger by facial solar panels I thought it was time to upgrade The inverter and charge controller, etc.
The installation went fairly smoothly and we got the system up and running. I’m a ham radio operator been one for 40 years also electrician and electrical engineer. after the first day in the evening early evening, I decided to turn on my HF radio and scan the band into my ultimate surprise, and discussed I had a loud pinging and whooping sound affectively, blocking all radio reception I consulted the solar engineers, and we all agreed that we started to trace down the product of the problem. My ham shack is a fortress against RFI and I’ve never had a bit of RFI in the shack. I have everything grounded and I have FRRITE beads on everything one to one current balanced it’s it’s an RFI fortress apparently not enough of a fortress to keep this crappy controller from acting like an overpriced, [moderator edit: removed profanity] radio jammer when I called the outfit that I bought this from their suggestion was for me to start a damn high school project with tinfoil and try to make a Faraday cage. Yeah, I think Victron dropped the ball on this [moderator edit: removed vitriol] should’ve been engineered a little better and not so cheap , I’ve got an outback flex max 80 that’s an absolute tank that never gave me a single problem with the old solar array and I had the solar panels on the roof the same structure underground with the outback 80 no Victron gear and my four element Yagi B Menna sets right above the basement where this gear is mounted
I appreciate the need to vent, but please keep in mind this is a technical forum, not social media.
Do you have a specific question about your product? Some RFI from these units can of course be minimized by turning off bluetooth, but in general sure, where a high degree of RF blocking is needed, a faraday cage or bag over the controller has often been used by other HAM operators around the globe - in a niche use-case, sometimes a fast and cheap solution of that kind is needed when using components that are not explicitely designed for that niche use-case.
OGPS
(Ed @ Off-Grid Power Systems - offgridps.com)
3
Roger, this is K8MEJ responding to you. It’s good to see another ham on the forum, but you’re not going to like what I’m about to say.
Had you done even a small amount of research before adding these components you would have already understood that the larger Victron MPPTs create a lot of noise. I wrote about this on this forum years ago and occasionally on other ham forums online. And I’m far from the only one. In fact, there is quite a bit documented about which MPPTs are RFI quiet and one EE/ham has a specific product offering. See here: Solar Charge Controllers and accessories
The same research would have shown that running higher battery voltages (i.e. 48V) would have allowed you to use much smaller MPPTs, which are pretty quiet (but not totally). Victron has committed to addressing the issues as the products are revised. Did you check to see if the MPPTs passed FCC Part 15 approval before you purchased?
Instead, you made an unwise decision that an EE and ham should not have and instead created an account here for the sole purpose of complaining and showing your a**. And, unfortunately, adding to the bad attitude that gives old men hams a bad reputation in public.
73 de K8MEJ
OGPS
(Ed @ Off-Grid Power Systems - offgridps.com)
4
Hahaha noted, I’m only on GMRS which is an acronym so never looked into whether ham was also an acronym
OGPS
(Ed @ Off-Grid Power Systems - offgridps.com)
6
Hah no worries. I have a GMRS license too but I’d have to go look up my callsign for that. Same for my commercial LMR license. But I have a label on those radios so I can remember them since I don’t use them much.
