Hydroelectric smoked GPS

When BF and I BP'd this week we left his car near a hydroelectric plant close to the wires and when I tried to get a bearing there, I got nothing, and I haven't been able to pick up anything since.
It was a Garmin 4trex 101.
Jim

That completely makes sense. There is a tiny LNP (low noise preamp) in there that probably got clobbered by spurious fields around that plant. Preamps are likely MOSFET based and VERY sensitive.

So I bought the GPS at REI and I called them and they said to bring it in. Great store.
Jim

Ok, here's a probably obvious question from us non-gps users.

If you had not turned it on around the power plant, would it still have ruined the unit?

How far away do you think you should have been?

T

Good question....
It all depends on what strength of field, or static discharge, Jim got into.
You'll note, things like sensitive computer boards and most electronic IC's come in a metallic coated plastic bag. This is to prevent static and strong fields from damaging the components even if they are OFF.
A power-plant's job is producing tremendous fields....so on or off, his gps/camera/phone, etc. could have suffered damage.
Manufactures work hard to prevent this but sometimes nothing works.

How far? No telling. He could have had a flakey part in the GPS that just needed a good excuse to go. Enough discharges from scooting across carpet can kill these things.

I have a feeling that it would have taken more to smoke it if it were turned off but still exposed to the fields. Antennas are supposed to absorb energy. A strong enough field would smoke the junction anyway, but with power on the strong field would have turned the transistor on harder and probably hurt it more. I was pretty close. It didn't hurt my camera, but my camera does not have antennas and the rest of the GPS is fine, just the antenna amplifiers are smoked. Makes me wonder about those "California" curly light bulbs and the radio energy they put out, I wonder if a GPS would burn up next to them? Those lights are not as safe as incandescent.
Jim

The RF interference From a compact florescent lamp is rather small. They don't have much of an effect on even AM radios. The field you were in at the power plant is another thing altogether. You can get a florescent tube to light up by just holding it up in the air under some of those power lines.

What was the weather like? The 60 Hz doesn't radiate much but in wet weather there is a lot of stray discharge that can produce RFI all over the spectrum.

I worried about those things when they first came out, making all sorts of RF noise but best I can tell, they are silent. I've got VHF/UHF and HF ham gear running all the time here and 13 of those curly lights within 10-25 feet of my station. I can't hear em'. The bigger tubes are different....you can hear a bad ballast.

Interesting....there is a lot more in those little CFL bulbs than I though, including a filter capacitor, which is why they don't make much noise, plus, instead of 60hz, they appear to run at 40khz!
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

I am relieved to know that those bulbs don't radiate strongly. My chandelier alone pulls 480 watts with incandescent bulbs. On the other hand soft white LED lights are about $30 a pop.
Jim
P.S. It was dry and sunny and I wasn't directly under the power lines, maybe 45 degrees.

Yup, I have cfls all over the house and have never seen them interfere with anything. By contrast, cheap dimmers and especially "touchpad" dimmers can wreck havoc, especially with a.m.

I've not heard of high tension powerlines ruining handheld electronics before but know of cyclists who've been "zapped" when riding carbon-fiber framed bikes beneath them. I don't really know what's at work there--perhaps some sort of inductive charge builds up in the bike and arcs to the cyclist?

Since a lot of urban and rural paths follow high-tension lines it's something to watch for I suppose.

Cheers,

Almost..."capacitive" charge. The bike acks as a big capacitor, exactly like an airplane, pulling a charge from the air. Static wicks discharge the plane as it flys.

I did a bike race and went up a hill called "Powerline" in CO while it was raining. I could feel the electricity in the air as the course essentially goes right under the lines. It kind of reminded me of the charge building up on a high peak just before a lightning strike.