That tracer hunt in Cincinnati had me second guessing everything

Spent 6 hours chasing a false alarm on a Vista panel, turned out a neighbor's ham radio was tripping the wired contact through the shared conduit. I kept swapping sensors and checking voltage, never thought to look outside the house. Anyone else had a weird external RF problem that made them question their whole troubleshooting flow?

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the_leo3d ago

That "shared conduit" bit is what got me. People forget the phone company and cable guys run their stuff in the same pipe sometimes, and those amplifiers they use can put out some serious junk. I had a similar thing once where a smart meter on the neighbors house was sending garbage down the neutral wire and it got into my panel's ground, made the keypad act like someone was mashing buttons at 3am. Took me two weeks and a borrowed spectrum analyzer to figure it out. The real kicker is those wireless contacts work on the same frequency as some garage door openers, so if anyone in the neighborhood has an old one, you might as well be playing roulette with your zones.