RFI radiating from our local hospital

 

FYI to any others in the Frenchs Forest area (or near a large hospital) as I am seeing interference across 6metres and beyond being emitted from the Northern Beaches Hospital  

This is something I noticed over 12months ago, it was not always there  but became more prevalent 6 months ago, I presumed it was someone's rogue solar panel inverter as it only seemed to appear during the day, but then I started noticing it at night, which led me to do more sniffing, so I used the spectrum display on my ic756 to see that it was blobs of noise about 25khz wide, spaced approximately 100khz apart, spreading from about 45 MHz to 60MHz, and it has some drift in it. It could be radiating across a wider range than 45-60MHz, that just happened to be the limit of my radio's receiver.  I could NOT detect the RFI below 30MHz, and could NOT detect the RFI at 144MHz and above.

I decided to go mobile in the local area, to find that the strongest signal strength is coming from the new hospital, then doing sweeps driving around the hospital, the strongest signal was found to be from the western side (60/9) and weakest point is on the eastern side (s1). It not like a data signal, it just blobs of noise.

I think it probably some sort of medical equipment up on the upper floors on the western  side radiating RFI. It seems to start up around 9am in the morning and may stop  as late as 10-11pm

I was discussing this with Mike VK2EK, he said he seen similiar type of signal out at Windsor, then noted he can see the hospital out there. He is going to go mobile to further investigate his RFI source. 

At this point in time it is probably a common piece of equipment used in hospitals, and I know it won't be a Diathermy machine, this RFI is from something else that radiates nicely on VHF Low band.

Next step is try to take something portable to the hospital to do some sniffing internally without getting arrested. Then once I am satisfied of where it is located in the building I can report it to ACMA.