A loud ghost in the machine

[Wrennika]

Hi all! I'm back with another strange problem. :mrgreen:

I have a Dell 8250. About two weeks ago, at exact times twice a day, a stacato series of beeps will blast over my speakers. For example, at 50 and 55 after every hour, all day and night, maybe 10 beeps of the same loud tone would blast out of the speakers. It sounds like Morse Code. It was also coming out of a clock radio in my back bedroom, so I thought that it had something to do with a two day power outage we had here, and maybe something got screwed up with the electricity after they fixed it, but this started a bit after they fixed it. But I hate the electric company so decided they did have something to do with it, and called them, complaining, 16 times in the last 6 days now, and counting. I unplugged my speakers, and the sounds come out of the monitor. I unplugged the DSL just to see if that had something to do with it; it didn't. The clock radio stopped beeping so I thought maybe that idiot Electric company fixed something. The comp was quiet for a few hours, then started up again. It is so loud you can hear it on the other side of the apartment, even tho I have the volume of all sounds off on the comp. It will jiggle and break up the picture on the monitor when it's beeping. Last night I unplugged the comp from all electricity but kept the cables to the monitor, etc, connected to the tower and it STILL did it. The other strange thing is the time it goes off moves up a few minutes a day; it now blasts it's beeps at 37 and 39 after each hour (see, I told you this was goofy as hell...). I touched nothing, installed nothing new, so I keep going back to this power failure and maybe it did something to something? It isn't the quiet, polite beep code, it's so loud it almost distorts. I promise I'm not nuts :lol: Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[DMR]

You might want to look at the environment around your house/neighborhood. Very strong electromagnetic bursts from an outside source can induce audible signals into speakers and other sound equipment, even if no power is applied to the devices (the wires to the devices pick up the signal because they act as antennae).

Here's an example:

I used to work for a professional audio recording facility located about 1/2 mile from the San Francisco bay, and during one recording project our equipment would pick up some nasty interference (very similar to what you describe), of short "bursty" duration, and at about the same time twice each day. The noise radiated into everything you could think of- our microphones, speakers, recording consoles, and tape machines, and was so bad that it caused us to stop the session during those times.

After a few weeks of examining every possible area of our facility for the source, some bright coworker figured it out somehow: it was the signal from the sweep radar on an aircraft carrier that was stationed at a naval base further down the bay. Each morning the carrier would pass close to our studio on its way out to sea for training manoeuvres, and each evening it would return to dock. The signal from its rotating radar antenna was so strong that it blasted us each time it passed.

Weird, eh? I doubt you're in the same situation, but you get the idea...