Ham radio causing USB disconnect

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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.