Grounding Ethernet

Just to emphasize how important grounding is..
I have two Ethernet to Fiber adapters, a modem, router and VOIP phone box.
I started feeling a strange sensation holding the phone to my head so I measured and it was 100V/M at the ear on my corded phone.
Unplugging the two fiber boxes turned out to reduce to 20V/M.  The boxes look like this:
https://www.trendnet.com/products/ethernet-fiber-converter/TFC-110S30i

Thankfully, they have a shiny silver knob that can be unscrewed and a wire wrapped around, then screwed back in. Upon grounding, the phone now measures 10V/M at the ear.
Since routers are plastic these days, there is no way to ground them, but if you can find a metal router that can be grounded, it will likely help a lot, and even provide a ground to any device plugged into it that uses only two prongs.. like a laptop.
I only use fiber with USB adapter, no ethernet, the difference can be picked up with a small radio. Even shielded ethernet cable emits enough to be picked up meters away, not sure why... There was nothing else I picked up so far away as I did ethernet cable.

Yes, I noticed a huge improvement in symptoms when I put in a ground loop isolator on the coax cable preceding my cable modem.  That's not "grounding", but it certainly eliminated a ground loop (as I was previously getting a 60hz hum in my stereo speakers, and could see rolling bars on analog video).

Marc

 

sailplane wrote

Even shielded ethernet cable emits enough to be picked up meters away, not sure why... There was nothing else I picked up so far away as I did ethernet cable.

I've seen the same problem with ethernet. Even with a braided copper cable sheath, the noise on an AM radio is very loud. I don't have a solution other than going to fiber, and some people have said that fiber adapters make a lot of noise. (The fiber modem here definitely does, with about twice as much noise on that end of the ethernet cable vs. the other end where the main switch is.)

Karl wrote

sailplane wrote

Even shielded ethernet cable emits enough to be picked up meters away, not sure why... There was nothing else I picked up so far away as I did ethernet cable.

I've seen the same problem with ethernet. Even with a braided copper cable sheath, the noise on an AM radio is very loud. I don't have a solution other than going to fiber, and some people have said that fiber adapters make a lot of noise. (The fiber modem here definitely does, with about twice as much noise on that end of the ethernet cable vs. the other end where the main switch is.)

this is what I use
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Winyao-USB100F-USB2-0-To-100FX-SFP-Desktop-Fiber-Ethernet-Network-Card-AX88772B/223223800764
It does have some noise that it puts on the USB .. but seems less than ethernet card/cable.. its not detectable by radio too far away like ethernet is. It does have it's own circuitry though so there is something coming out of it.. although it feels less than ethernet to me.