Ham radio causing USB disconnect

For a while now, whenever I’ve had my PC on, and I’ve been talking on SSB (several bands), I hear occasional Windows USB connect/disconnect sounds. Generally a disconnect sound whenever I start talking, and then a connect sound when I finish.

You can poke around in the Windows Event Viewer to try and figure out what’s going on, or you can do what I did – download USB Log View, one of the many very handy utilities from NirSoft. I’ve used NirSoft utilities for years now, including PingInfoView, CurrPorts, NK2Edit, RegFromApp, and more.

I loaded up USB Log View, went over to the radio, screamed into the microphone (of course, always ID-ing my transmissions 😉 ) and witnessed the following:

I have my webcam and TrackIR plugged into a powered USB hub on my desk. That’s the culprit. Now, is the offending noise entering the hub via the USB cable or the power cable? Unplug the power cable, repeat test, no USB events logged.

A clip-on ferrite solves the issue, again.

A freeware utility from NirSoft saves the day again.

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AD5GG

AD5GG works in the real world as an RF design engineer. Occasionally, he posts articles on this very site. Sometimes they're even worth reading. Please feel free to comment on posts using the comment system at the end of each post, and use the discussion forum.

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Peter L
6 years ago

Lol! A long time back I was printing a RTTY QSO and one of the stations 1) was operating AFSK (via a sound card) and 2) didn’t have system sounds disabled. Hilarity ensued. At first I was confused about where the Windows sounds were coming from thinking it was my own station. Nope. Finally realized it was one of the ops on the radio. I joined the conversation and let him know.

AD5GG
AD5GG
Reply to  Peter L
6 years ago

Haha! I didn’t know if it would be something that others would see a lot of but yeah, it seems like it’s a pretty common problem. My cheapo USB hub must be the ultimate in design! 😉
Don’t buy one of these Dynex $6 4 port hubs:
comment image

Actually it’s probably time for a new one.

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