Re: RF Immunity in Smoke Detectors

[Nomen Nescio <nobody@xxxxxxxxx>]

G. Morgan said:

>Those HAM guys always crack me up.  Whenever something doesn't work
>with their giant transmitters nearby, it's OUR problem.

In the early days of television, people used to complain about ham radios
causing interference on their TVs.  From what I hear, the problems were
mostly due to poor design of the TVs, rather than the ham radio guys doing
anything wrong.  Even so, hams would sometimes go to their neighbor's house
and use their technical expertise to add the necessary filtering to the TV
sets, just to be good neighbors.

I am not a ham, but there do seem to be a couple things the OP could look
into:

1.  Is it the smoke detector or the control panel that's getting tripped?
Remove smoke detector, install EOL at smoke location, and key the mike:  if
it trips, it's obviously not the smoke detector.

2.  Is the control panel grounded?  We could argue about whether grounds
attract lightning strikes or not, but if the circuitry is picking up large
amounts of RF, the RF has to have somewhere to go.

- badenov