I’ve been slow to post this update, because for a while, it looked like PG&E might actually have shown an interest in identifying the origin of the RFI that has plagued my neighborhood for the last two years, and I was cautiously optimistic that their intentions were honest and sincere. My optimism was misplaced.
What they were actually doing was making an effort to locate anything they could in my neighborhood that they could blame for the RFI, other than their own equipment. They settled on a cable TV amplifier. I, of course, did my due diligence and pointed a Yagi at the amplifier in question, and while it is putting out a small amount of RFI, it manifests as a high-frequency sine wave, not as a 120-pulse-per-second buzz.
So I set out to do, again, what PG&E has failed to do for the last two years: I located the source for them. This time, I recorded the entire noise hunt on video so the whole world can see just how easy it is to track down, and how there’s simply no way that PG&E’s inability to find this source could be attributed to simple incompetence. A child could find a noise source this obvious. PG&E has much nicer equipment at their disposal than I do. They could easily find this problem if they wanted to.
Here’s the entire noise hunt, captured on video, for the whole world to see. This is what PG&E won’t do. Not out of incompetence- incompetence cannot explain this behavior. You’d need to be actively trying not to find this noise in order not to find it.
It’s been said both “don’t ascribe to malice that which can be explained with incompetence” and “any sufficiently advanced form of incompetence is indiscernible from malice.” I propose another adage: any sufficiently advanced form of malice need not be explained by incompetence.
Enjoy: