But as I tuned through the band, I noticed that the signals were all drowned out by a high noise level. Hmm, maybe it's just not a good night? Or maybe something in my room is causing excess noise...? I turned off the overhead light - no difference. I looked at the air conditioner, but decided to let it run. (Nope, don't care whether it generates noise or not, I'm leaving it on!) Then, I noticed my laptop...
Note to self: unplug the macbook while scanning the band for QSOs.
Yep, power supplies can sure be noisy - that includes laptop power supplies! With the macbook unplugged, the noise level dropped considerably. I guess that's what happens when I use a little vertical antenna indoors. It's probably picking up a whole bunch of other interior noise, as well. At any rate, after that I was able to catch the end of a conversation about flying between a k1 and a k5 station. W1AW was probably the clearest station that I heard, not counting one down around 7.020-something that was too fast for me to copy. It wasn't a good night for call sign & QSO copy practice, but it still was good to practice zero-beating and investigating noise reduction techniques here in the shack.