I ran into this a few weeks ago with a USB 3.0 thumb drive interrupting my Wi-Fi network communication on my PC.
I fixed this by putting the USB 3.0 thumb drive through the washing machine in my pants pocket. After being washed, the thumb drive no longer works, but my wi-fi is working great now, thanks to the washing machine. Problem gone.
Given current data in the area of climate change (I say this as a California resident who has seen firsthand the effects of long term drought in the area), we need to consciously conserve water. Reservoirs are drying up, fires are out of control, etc. Please don’t contribute to the problem. Use a hammer.
Apple's article mentions USB 3 devices, but the issue is very much with Mac Mini's ports. Moving the devices further away doesn't help much.
I have a pair of cheap Bluetooth earbuds. They have a range of about 30 feet with when paired with an iPhone and about 4 feet when paired with the Mini. Apple's Magic Mouse needs to be within about 4 feet to work as well.
If I have my USB external drive plugged into the port next to the little USB dongle for my wireless logitech mouse, the mouse doesn't work properly. I have to shift one of the USB connectors to the other side of the laptop.
Same here. I had an issue with Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Whenever a pendrive was plugged in to an USB hub both the mouse and keyboard had their ranges reduced to about 20cm.
I have the same problem with a Plugable dock and Logitech keyboard, and actually it was on their website which I first found out about this issue and link to Intel's site. Plugable says that getting any small amount of distance between the USB3.0 chip and the 2.4ghz transmitter/receiver helps, and recommended using a USB2.0 extension dongle to get the needed separation.
I always got much better signal by plugging my mouse into a usb 2.0 hub attached to my 3.1 hub as opposed to directly attaching it to the 3.1 hub, and I just chalked it up to distance and cheap components. Mystery solved!
I was having issues with my wireless mouse getting flaky when my phone is on my desk; I thought it might be WiFi or Bluetooth signals from the phone, but this makes me wonder if it's because I plug in to charge over USB.
I just saw somebody mention (on an amazon review for an Aukey charger) that their USB-C car charger was interfering with TPMS system on their car. That's a little scary. Hopefully they'll get it ironed out soon.
I realize TPMS is not 2.4gz but thought that was relevant to interference concerns
There's actually a ton of RF interference out there, just that it doesn't impact enough people on a regular basis for anyone to do anything about it.
The 2 meter radio I have in my car goes crazy with RF(up to S9) when I drive through the local Starbucks. That said bringing it up with anyone will probably get you a couple funny looks and not much else.
Notably, powerline ethernet destroys nearly the entire HF range, from 3 to 30MHz. This isn't just bad for radio hams, it ruins shortwave and some AM radio too.
The issue is that as you and others use powerline ethernet, you leak electromagnetic interference patterns back into the powerlines. This buildup of interference from multiple homes creates problems around your area, even if you don't notice it yourself.
Except unless you have some sort of an impedance follower you'll probably just end up attenuating your powerline networking to the point of not working.
Most of the useful signal in the system is going directly from one circuit to another. The signal headed out toward the power meter is mostly dead, and you might even improve the networking by getting rid of those extra echoes.
I'd be really surprised if it works that way. I'm not a power systems engineer but I've worked a fair bit on the low voltage side of things.
My guess is that the connection to your house to the service wires in incredibly low impedance, otherwise you'd see all sorts of voltage sags when you used a large appliance with an inductive load(or power tool). So any change large enough to affect the service line is going to go straight into your house. Circuits aren't directional(unless you have a diode or voltage/impedance follower) hence why it would impact the quality of power-line networking.
Additionally any sort of low pass filter(RC, LC or RLC) involves putting a inductor(P) or resistor(R) in series with the circuit(AKA your transmission wires) which isn't simple or cheap.
The impedance going to all your neighbors is pretty low too, but I don't think the system relies on signals going out that far and echoing back. High frequencies have more of a transmission line model, which is pretty directional. There's free impedance everywhere.
My understanding is that you mostly care about the minor reflections caused by wire junctions in a system like this, and that line headed outside is more or less a signal sink no matter what. It's possible a capacitor would need to be a bit further away than directly at the breaker box, but by the time you reach the pole I'm reasonably confident that absorbing the entire signal with $.50 of components and no inductor would be fine.
So, let's say that even what you're proposing is correct(which I'm pretty dubious about).
Is your house longer than 32ft/64ft? Those lengths are halfwave on 20m/40m and make a great radiator. For reference all I need is 5w to get out ~400mi so I'm sure these things are kicking off a ton of RF on those frequencies.
Fundamentally if you have an unshielded wire and you're driving these frequencies across it you're going to see RFI along those frequences(along with the harmonics).
Well I think it's a multifaceted issue, but I am not educated on how your home itself contributes to the radiation profile so I left that bit of speculation out.
Radio interference from switching voltage regulators, power supplies etc. is normal as most of them work from several hundred KHz to above 1 MHz generating PWM square waves whose harmonics fill the spectrum up to hundreds of MHz and beyond. They're circuit-wise very close to RF transmitters, so it's a normal behaviour. The RF junk they produce however can be filtered out both by putting them behind good screening and by filtering both their input and output lines. This cost money though so cheap ones will perform much worse, and some of them don't employ any method at all to reduce interference.
My favorite source of noise was a Korean fluorescent lamp with power factor correction (makes the inductive lamp load look resistive to prevent parasitic current flow in the power lines). It was square wave chopping the 120-240VAC=175-350Vpp input to the ballast at the plug with a variable frequency (100kHz-1MHZ) based on input voltage phase. A very simple circuit that efficiently coupled >1Wrms into a narrow band (~10kHz fundamental)swept square-wave into a 2m antenna.
I integrated the total power with a spectrum analyzer... but any radio I tested (including GPS, FM, WiFi & GSM maybe due to IF or saturation?) would stop working within 10ft=3m of the lamp. Driving around I could tell if the lamp was on using my AM radio (set to any station) due to the 120Hz buzz from several blocks away.
As far as I could tell it had passed Korean FCC equivalent, several tens of thousands were imported, and sold (at Frys at one point) around the country.
I destroyed ours, but sometimes, just driving around, I think I can hear one when I switch to AM.
Did you report it to the FCC? I understand if you didn't, as a consumer, and this is not an attack on you. But this kind of thing should be punished, and one of the main ways to do this is to bring this to the attention of the regulating authorities.
We can only keep the spectrum in good shape by, as a producer or designer, test and design to comply. As an importer, require and check certifications on what we import. As a consumer, report when we find something being funky. (again, not blaming you)
Any device operating at those frequencies should have an FCC sticker, meaning they've been tested to make sure radiated RF is below some legal limits. If the cheap devices don't have the sticker or have a fake sticker or were materially changed after passing the tests, they're illegal in the US.
On some vehicles (Honda, IIRC) if the TPMS isn't working (dead sensor battery, interference, etc) the stability control system will assume the tire on that wheel can't be trusted to apply grip when correcting the vehicle's trajectory, so you might not stay on the road in an oversteer/understeer situation.
Yep, my "docking station" at work consists of a USB3 hub that I plug in to my laptop.
Took me a week before I learned that I need to plug in the Logitech wireless USB thinger directly in to my laptop. Plugging it into the hub made the mouse partially unresponsive.
1. Do not place USB ports near antennas, or RF parts
2. USB allows for rather large deviation from base frequency, use a drifting frequency source to spread the emission spectrum
3. Use shielding where possible
This was a big issue for me on my Intel NUC, the wireless keyboard's receiver dongle was plugged into a USB3 port and received lots of interference. Installing it into a 1-ft USB extension cable solved the problem completely.
I have two of those, and they don't even work well as doorstops. Intel crippled them in multiple ways, apparently varying by model, to the point where I'm not even sure it was intentional. But both of mine are useless to me because the BIOS refuses to boot without a monitor attached[1]. Apparently that was fixed in some models, but updates made no difference.
[1] One I can sometimes trick with a "headless" DP cable, but even that isn't reliable enough to stick in a closet and forget about.
Totally off topic in this thread, but I also have two of them I use for dev machines (one at home and one at the office), and I love them. Both run linux perfectly, all hardware supported, they're fast, powerful, quiet and low-power.
Both of mine are Intel-branded, I forget which models. (They're in a box of things I've been too lazy to try to sell.)
I really love the form factor - about four of these would replace close to a kW-worth of hardware I currently run, and could hide in a closet. Maybe I should try again with known-good versions.
I bought a USB 3.0 Ethernet to USB adapter and it seems since then my Logitech wireless mouse has troubling hold a mouse down. I've been trying to nail down the issue. Maybe the interference is the cause. What do you think?
I commented above about this: remove the Logitech dongle from your USB3 hub and plug it directly into your machine. That was the only way I could "fix" it.
I had concerns about RFI when purchasing my LimeSDR[1] USB version. Perhaps adding more shielding on the back side of the ports and around the unit itself is in order? I imagine that aluminum could help and it is fairly easy to put in place.
are you saying you were concerned about RFI before you purchased the LimeSDR or that you've noticed RFI when attempting to use the LimeSDR? is this the one with the usb-a connector or the usb 3 micro b? Thanks.
Sorry for the delay in responding, I didn't notice the reply. I was concerned with it before purchasing because I had heard there was a good amount of RFI produced by USB in general. I have the USB 3 micro B, I feel that a good enclosure could mitigate a lot my concerns (and the article seems to back it up). If you would like any pictures please let me know, I can try to provide them.
Yes. I've fought this battle with Logitech wireless devices for years since I upgraded to a 15" MacBook Pro with retina (USB 3 only, no USB 2) and added a USB 3.0 hub. It's impossible to put the dongle in a USB port that doesn't incur massive interference. I've even tried using USB extension cables. It's terrible.
EDIT: I came across this whitepaper when looking into the problem a few years ago and just accepted that performance of wireless mice and keyboards is going to be bad. I haven't yet seen any good bluetooth replacements. Most of the bluetooth keyboards I see are smaller without 10-key. I think I had a bluetooth mouse at one point and the lag was unbearable (given, this was years ago, so maybe they're better now).
That would make sense, as flaky as Bluetooth can be one of its more futuristic features is supposed to be aggressive frequency hopping to avoid interference.
Yeah i think the biggest source of flakiness with Bluetooth is when people pretend it is wifi and stick devices behind various objects but expect the connection to remain flawless.
Only usb-to-bluetooth dongles are likely to have the signal strength to penetrate walls. Mobile devices, and in particular earpieces and similar small devices, are likely to use weaker signals that rely heavily on being reflected off surfaces to get around obstacles.
And one such obstacle is the human body. Thus putting you phone on one side, and the ear piece on the other side may results in poor reception. But standing near a surface, be it a wall, a car, or something else, in front or behind may allow better reception as the signal can bounce off said surface.
Not meaning to contradict you because most of my experience matches this, but I would really like to get more detail on Apple’s W1 enchanted bluetooth as used in AirPods, which consistently work smoothly through 2 or 3 walls.
Well, I ask because I thought the reason you needed an airplane mode on your phones was because of radio interference with some kind of equipment... but of course they do have wifi during the flight so I think it might be related to take-off and landing procedure were interference is a problem? Or else just total BS?
It’s a legacy restriction - it was just that they banned any radio transmitters, probably originally because older analogue radio transmitters could interfere with the aircraft’s radios and things.
I don’t think there would have ever been any legitimate concern of low-power digital devices like mobile phones causing any problems like coupling into control systems or anything... Digital radios are typically much better filtered and far lower power than analogue radios.
The company I work for makes satellite antennas for ships and large road vehicles, and the only time we’ve had a problem like that was when somebody mounted a 20kW S-band weather radar three metres from our antenna. It just requires a little extra shielding in one module though.
That's an interesting point, although you have to remember airplane mode turns off all radios on the device, not only the Wi-Fi. They probably use it as a "fool-proof" method to prevent any unintentional interference with both current and future wireless devices.
That being said, unofficially I agree, given Wi-Fi is provided on flights now, I'm sure that means you're alright to leave your Wi-Fi radio on. The answer to why shut off all GSM/CDMA, Bluetooth, and GPS radios as well, however, probably predates the high prevalence of all these wireless technologies in a unified device.
There are no FAA regulations regarding phones/electronic devices other than a blanket rule that you can only enable them with the permission of the captain. The rules regarding cellphone use on planes is from the FCC. They don't want tubes full of transceivers broadcasting at max power (phones ramp up power to search for towers where there are none) high above the earth where they can broadcast over the greatest physical area. At 30k+ft this is not a huge concern (too high for a noticeable increase in the noise floor) but in terminal areas they could conceivably tie up bandwidth on every tower in the city. Whether this is a concern with modern cell towers is up for debate however.
I don't really understand. Do you mean cell site simulators (IMSI catchers?) interfering with aircraft or flying the simulators on aircraft to broaden their reach?
In the latter case, they would (I'm assuming) be flown with proper high gain directional antennas instead of tiny antennas mostly hidden inside a metal tube that attenuates most of their signal
It's been 5 years and no one has managed to turn a USB controller into a WiFi adapter (nor a WiFi adapter into a USB sniffer), so I'm guessing the signals are only near enough to intefere and not anything beyond that.
This is from 2012 and old news in the Vive community where we try to use USB2.0 to avoid these and other issues. There's a few 3.0 chipsets/configs/layouts/whatever that cause serious 2.4ghz interference and that can affect motion controller latency, wifi internet connections, etc.
The solution to fixing the dock issues (partially) is to swap out the wifi card. The Broadcom card puts out lots of interference (no issues with a Intel AC wireless card).
This is a great example of an Apple-style solution vs a Dell style solution.
Just bought a laptop, and now you need to start hacking it up and changing the wifi-card so it doesn't cause interference to itself? What next, break out the soldering iron and go over all the cold joints?
Thanks for posting this! Whenever I plug my backup hard drive into my laptop (it connects over USB 3), my wifi connection drops. I guess I'll have to try switching to 5GHz during backups…
Had an issue with my previous Macbook Air and a USB3 external drive where the wifi would completely stop working when I plugged the drive in. Sounds like it might be related to this.
I started getting interference on my wireless keyboard + USB hard drive when using my USB-C hub … I'd been blaming it on the hub for this whole time. Thanks for sharing!
Weren't mesh wireless networks made to help this issue?
Also 802.11aX is out soon, it will use 2.4/5ghz just with a bit more bandwidth on both, so you may want to just wait for that instead. (edit: looks to be maybe +25% or so more)
It's great to see RFI problem that impact the profits of big firms. Most RFI is generated because firms cut corners and lazy/crony regulators fail to enforce FCC part 15 rules.
Exactly. In many devices, including switching supplies, a bit of attention (and a few very low-cost parts) will bring the devices into compliance. RFI suppression steps are in the data sheet / example circuit for nearly all components used in switching supplies, FWIW.
But just as firms want to be able to import steaks that have been made from cattle raised near polluted foreign rivers, firms import power supplies made with RFI-suppression parts omitted because someone along the way wants that $0.15 as profit and US regulators don't care.
Incidentally, a law was passed fairly recently that allows agricultural firms to remove information about where food items were produced, so quite possibly the steaks we eat will soon be made from cows who drink the water runoff from the polluting factories that make the low quality switching supplies.
Our "first world" environmental regulations (food quality, air and water quality, RF noise floor) are only as good as our regulation of imported products that commit fraud by selling products that do not comply. By failing to enforce these laws, US regulators have helped foreign firms cheat their way into the US market, putting US firms out of business and harming consumers indirectly by polluting their environment.
I'm not arguing that all of those regulations make sense, just that it is silly to have laws that we don't enforce when the health consequences and RFI consequences harm everyone.
Do you mean devices with RFI-suppression components omitted to save cost? Those devices are subject to FCC part 15 rules just like devices manufactured domestically.
> from off-brand vendors
Again, who is supposed to enforce that these vendors comply with US laws? My point is that those laws are not enforced. The reason that look-alike Apple USB charger costs $3.99 is because it contains no RFI suppression parts and is probably made with toxic plastic.
It is the job of regulators to shut down firms importing this garbage. By failing to do so the regulators harm the people their regulations are supposed to protect. Meanwhile, US firms who comply with the rules can't sell their USB chargers for a competitive price so they go out of business.
Got it. Your first post made it sound like big, lazy firms were the problem. Sounds like what you're really talking about is cheap imported stuff and a lack of enforcement.
Yes. Some firms like Amazon profit heavily from the sale of counterfeit products and low-quality junk products that are shipped directly from overseas and cannot be inspected.
Most consumers won't realize that the USB charger they purchased for a fraction of the cost of a name brand product is why their phone's battery capacity declined so quickly.
With so many sellers on Amazon doing bait-and-switch, solving the problem is going to be very difficult for Amazon to solve without causing a disruption in the flow of low-cost electronics.
I fixed this by putting the USB 3.0 thumb drive through the washing machine in my pants pocket. After being washed, the thumb drive no longer works, but my wi-fi is working great now, thanks to the washing machine. Problem gone.