Has this happened to anyone else?

TRJC24PRS

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Atlanta, Ga

Heres a video of my amp picking up a radio signal.. Not sure how but it sure did scare the hell out of me.
Ive had this MT-15 for a few months now since PRS replaced the one I got originally when it first came out., and this surely was interesting. Just wondering if this has happened to anyone else who owns an MT-15 here.
 
Nope, only you, and it is really weird. o_O

lol! The first time it happened to me, I was napping on the couch and was rudely awakened when I heard a loud voice in the room where I thought I was alone. It was a truck driver on the interstate nearby coming through my amp which I had left on. After that, several similar instances have happened, once even picking up the stereo playing in the next room. The closer my guitar was to the wall, the louder the sound through my amp.

BTW, I believe it is the guitar acting as an antenna, nothing wrong with it.
 
Just think, somewher an Amateur Radio operator is thinking ' who in the heck is playing AC/DC?!?'

The original old school guitar amplifiers came out if old radios. The circuitry in todays amps are not much different than those. Add in the right amount of cables pickups and pedals, and Poof! You have an instant radio.

Its annoying, but per the FCC all electronic equipment Must be able to receive and accept a certain amout of RF interference. Our equipment does that better than any other.
 
uncommon but it does happen, once I heard circular saw sounds, and it was perfect with an ACDC riff.
 
Nah - it happens, and not just with guitars and amps. This was examined in the documentary "American Pie 2", although that focused more on walkie talkies, police radios, and fast food wireless technology.
 
The buzz is a ground loop. Power mains carry a lot more than power. They carry RF as well. Fix the ground loop and you should be good.

This^^^

Poorly made cables can also act as an antenna, though it's less common.

A ground loop means that your signal is "seeing" two paths to ground. I'm assuming, perhaps wrongly, that you're using pedals?

There are a lot of workarounds, but the easiest and most effective solution is to power your pedals with a high quality, isolated power supply, like the Voodoo Labs products. This prevents ground loops from happening with more than one pedal, etc. Cheap pedal power supplies don't do this well.

If you're using something like an ABY box to switch between two amps, there's another common source of ground issues. That gets solved with an isolation transformer between the switcher and one, not both, of the amps.

If you're using your amp's effects loop, that can be a whole 'nother can of worms.

How do you figure out what the cause is? Simple. Disconnect everything and plug the guitar straight into the amp. Then add each pedal, one by one, until you find the culprit. The same process goes for effects loops, though that's sometimes a little harder to solve.
 
Yeah, you need to clean up your RF environment. Moving the amp is likely to improve it. If not there are filters you can put on your line but I wouldn't start there. I had a Peavey Classic 30 that used to pick up stations.
 
Same experience as the OP regards my Mesa LoneStar head/cabs. The clean channels were good, the 2nd channels, especially with specific distortion effects driving the front of the amps, caused RF. Could never determine where the signal originated from, but was a Latino channel that my stereo receiver couldn't locate. Eventually got rid of the distortion effect and then the Mesas about a year later...

Although I never gigged with the Mesas, it was a strange experience. Like Gilligan's Island and the radio mouth...
 
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