Spikes!!! These have been going on for months now and it’s driving me crazy. There is no pattern to them and some and be very huge. Is it possible electrical interference? Electrical surges? This Shake has been in this location for a couple years with no issues. Unfortunately, this Shake R0ED0 is in Thailand and I’m in China. It is located in the back bedroom that is only used when we are in Thailand and the house sits in a rural area. However, my wife is there right now and we did a video call for visual inspection and everything looks good. Today, my wife is going to purchase and connect a new power outlet surge protector in hopes that the old one may have become faulty. I cannot think of anything else. The house is occupied by one person and nothing has changed in the bedroom or around the house. I don’t know how to attach a screenshot here, but if you go to my station’s DataView, you should be able to see what I’m talking about.
Hello mrbrunt, and welcome back to the community!
I think I can see what you mean by your local helicorder (thanks for the screenshot you shared in our Discord). Indeed, some of the spike magnitudes are quite high!
Usually, spikes like that can appear due to RF interferences and/or electrical surges. So, your thought of buying a new surge protector is a good one, and we’ll see if it’ll have any positive effect.
For RF interferences instead, it may be a bit more complicated as, depending on the distance to the transmitter and the power of the transmission, you could need something like this to shield the Shake in full: Amateur Radio & My RF Shielded Raspberry Shake Vault Experiment.
They only seem to appear in the very low frequencies of the spectrum, as highlighted here:
If the new power surge protector doesn’t do the trick, and the vault-like option is too complex to implement for now, you can use the clipping function of DataView to “remove” the spikes and access your data. For example, this is the view with no Clip/RMS applied, and a Global 0.1 - 0.8 Hz bandpass filter:
After you Clip it to +/- 30000 counts:
It could be a good compromise to still see low frequency distant events and temporarily “erase” the spikes in the helicorder view.