Powercut 22 oct 2019 and the result on the radio spectrum.

Today there was a planned power cut in our street (Merksem, a suburb of Antwerp in Belgium). Interesting to see what would be the effect on the radio spectrum. The last decade lots of electronic junk has been put into service in households but also in professional applications resulting in a lot of electrosmog on the bands. 

First of all, I had to put my Wellbrook ALA-1530 antenna back on the roof while all MF/HF DXing is now done from a remote location. I removed it a few years ago to be replaced by a Yagi for weather sondes  and later for a DAB logper to monitor what's going on there.

I planned to use my laptop and feed the Perseus by usb power. The ALA was fed by regular batteries. 

Initially I was surprised that the situation didn't become much worse over the years. It was even possible to hear several Trans-Atlantic stations in the morning from the US of the MW-AM band.

On the other hand, it was very disappointing to see that the power cut didn't give the clean spectrum you would expect. 

Here are the results. I have made several animated gifs. It's quite clear which one is the one when power was up again.

---

VLF frequency range is affected very heavy probably by lots of switching power supplies.

The upper medium wave is somewhat affected but not as bad as feared. 

The 2.5 MHz range is the one that is affected the less.

On 14 MHz you can see clearly that the Ham band is notched out in the PLC internet over powerline devices.  But when power was cut, the interference is still a lot more present than expected while a whole block of houses and apartments was cut from power. That QRM is really traveling far.

The same goes for 18 and 21 MHz. Where on 14 MHz the hash still goes away more or less, on 18 and 21 MHz the difference is marginal. 

And this last picture gives the complete frequency range of the Perseus up to 40 MHz.

The workers in the street replacing cables.