I am trying to help someone in a different forum who lives in Italy and is having RFI problems, likely from a new 5G cell phone installation near his flat.
Can someone local give advice on where you can source small quanities of components? I live in North America, and DigiKey is my usual source here, wide selection and relatively quick delivery through the mail. We also have alternative mail order sources like Mouser.
Have those become international, or are there better local suppliers in southern Europe?
The specific components would likely be ferrite beads and ceramic caps.
On a related note, would anyone in Italy or close enough in Europe be interested in helping the person out by building a guitar cable with RFI suppression built into the connectors? My attempt would be something like large Fair-Rite type 61 beads on the exterior of the cable, with small Fair-Rite type 61 beads on the center conductor inside the connector, and SMT ceramic capacitors from the center pin to the shell threads of the connector. I have not actually tried that capacitor mounting yet to see if it can be made durable, but I think multiple SMT capacitors in parallel would be the only thing with even a hope of being effective at cell phone frequencies (5G band most likely to cause interference is at 700MHz). Realistically the caps would probably not be effective at that frequency, so maybe something else would be needed. Or maybe the beads would be enough.
This person does not seem to be a hardware hobbyist (primarily a musician and music software hobbyist). I would not mind doing it here in the US, but I am afraid that shipping to Italy would cost multiples of the component costs and would be hard to justify.
Any recommendations for component supplies, or even anecdotes about similar interference problems that have been solved, or at least analyzed a little more technically would be useful as well. This is a guitar connected to the instrument input of a USB audio interface, and the person does not have access to any RF test equipment, so the conclusion that is it cell phone based interference is based on listening to the resulting audio interference, a cell phone broadcast antenna noticed nearby, and the fact that the interference occurs in that location, in the next apartment building over, but not when the same recording equipment is taken to a different location in a nearby city.
Can someone local give advice on where you can source small quanities of components? I live in North America, and DigiKey is my usual source here, wide selection and relatively quick delivery through the mail. We also have alternative mail order sources like Mouser.
Have those become international, or are there better local suppliers in southern Europe?
The specific components would likely be ferrite beads and ceramic caps.
On a related note, would anyone in Italy or close enough in Europe be interested in helping the person out by building a guitar cable with RFI suppression built into the connectors? My attempt would be something like large Fair-Rite type 61 beads on the exterior of the cable, with small Fair-Rite type 61 beads on the center conductor inside the connector, and SMT ceramic capacitors from the center pin to the shell threads of the connector. I have not actually tried that capacitor mounting yet to see if it can be made durable, but I think multiple SMT capacitors in parallel would be the only thing with even a hope of being effective at cell phone frequencies (5G band most likely to cause interference is at 700MHz). Realistically the caps would probably not be effective at that frequency, so maybe something else would be needed. Or maybe the beads would be enough.
This person does not seem to be a hardware hobbyist (primarily a musician and music software hobbyist). I would not mind doing it here in the US, but I am afraid that shipping to Italy would cost multiples of the component costs and would be hard to justify.
Any recommendations for component supplies, or even anecdotes about similar interference problems that have been solved, or at least analyzed a little more technically would be useful as well. This is a guitar connected to the instrument input of a USB audio interface, and the person does not have access to any RF test equipment, so the conclusion that is it cell phone based interference is based on listening to the resulting audio interference, a cell phone broadcast antenna noticed nearby, and the fact that the interference occurs in that location, in the next apartment building over, but not when the same recording equipment is taken to a different location in a nearby city.
