just looked at Agentschap Telecom’s website and they are equally plagued by such kit over the water.

Their inspectors are pointing out that whilst they can turn up if a badly run pirate rig is cutting across legal broadcasters and analogue communications radios (or such radios are badly configured and cut across other users frequencies), or if everyone in a car park cannot unlock their car due to another remote on that frequency causing interference, they cannot do much about single interference incidents from stuff which does not need a license and has a CE mark already (as it is supposed to have been designed in compliance with the anti intererence rules), other than encourage the owners of such equipment to stop using it and/or complain to the suppliers, which if it happens enough then the Douane can intercept the bad equipment when it comes in.

The top boffin at AT now gives this, perfectly valid and effective but somewhat drastic advice,

Schakel eerst eens de hoofdschakelaar van de meterkast uit. Als de storing dan ophoudt, zit de bron in je eigen huis. Ga vervolgens kijken in welke stroomgroep het zit.

first switch the incomer (main switch) in the meter cupboard off. if the interference then stops, the source is in your own house. Then check in which circuit it is in.

(In NL and other mainland European countries there are no ring final circuits, just 6A general lighting circuits, 16A radials for power sockets, and maybe 32A or 40A for “strong appliances” like cookers, electric showers etc).

Even the 6A circuit could be a suspect TBH, as nearly everyone has replaced glow lamps with “eco friendly” ones – the cheap ones are horrendous for interference, there are times when I’ve literally sat in the darkness and cursed a lamp because of this..

But – he also assumes that the complainant is using something like a LF/MF/analogue radio receiver powered by its own local batteries, and possibly lives on his own (and probably a middle aged, cross old man as younger radio enhusiasts would be more likely to try and locate/and or decode what the intererence was..)

I can just imagine the effect of putting the incomer off on the rest of the folk in an average Dutch family house, especially in the evening when it is dark. If Jan Steen were alive today it would be a perfect subject for his painting (though he would have to visit Conrad first and buy a battery powered hand lamp)

The vrouw would be complaining ach, wat een elllende, (especially if she is sat watching her favourite TV-show) the hond “aan te blaffen” (barking) as he knows it is “niet normaal” for the house to go into darkness like that, the teenage zoon is unhappy because his x-box has stopped, and his laptop won’t go online even with the accus working (routers usually need 230V) and when he went downstairs for munchies the keuken was in darkness and he was “de poes over gestruikeld“, and she glares at him hard for this, along with as the dochter at her father as whilst her smartphone just still works on 3G, the sight of the paterfamilias suspiciously searching the teenagers rooms for rogue electronics equipment and pointing a 1970s transistor radio at her hair straighteners will end up with her complaining “Hoi! Papa wordt gek, hij moet het asiel in!”

This will also certainly have the effect of preventing all the DECT telephones from working and if there is a huistelefooncentrale (many larger houses have these and even ISDN) it would have to reboot before anyone calls could be made which takes a few minutes on some systems, so he can’t even call Agentschap Telecom anyway during that time. Which might be precisely what the smart engineer at AT intended :laugh_at: