I AM IN RADIO CONTACT
W1EMI at the ARRL suggested that if I had a handheld Yagi and an HT that can demodulate AM on UHF, it could be very helpful to do some direction-finding and narrow it down to which pole is causing the trouble. I didn’t have a Yagi before, but I have one now.
After assuring my neighbors that I’m not from space or anything, I walked around trying to pinpoint the noise tonight. The noise itself was not very cooperative, being somewhat intermittent in the gusty winds, but I was able to narrow it down to two potential poles, and neither one was the one I originally thought it was. I suspect this is why switching to UHF can really help.
Unfortunately both poles are in other people’s back yards (and just a few houses away from ours) and the main lobe of the antenna is just wide enough that with an intermittent sound, I can’t quite discern for certain which pole it is. I suspect with a more constant sound I would be able to tell a little bit better, and a constant buzz might be enough to heat up an insulator so it shows up on a thermal image.
Noteworthy is the fact that both of the suspect poles are part of the same run of wire on which there have been two catastrophic insulator failures in the last three years, both of which resulted in powerlines down in people’s back yards and small pole fires. Thus it would be irresponsible of me to let this go and not make PG&E fix it.