I have discovered something that seems reproducible and therefore likely to be a real effect.
My RED is sitting in the dining room, with a 50' CAT5 UNshielded cable running down to my router. About 5 feet away is a Netgear box that both extends my wireless, but also allows up to four hard-wired devices to plug in and have the NetGear convert them from a hard wire to being connected with the router via WiFi. WN2000RPT Universal WiFi Range Extender and 4 Port WiFi Adapter.
This Netgear was purchased to allow me to set my controller in a little shed further from noise, and also allow the antennas to be moved even further away from my house.
The antennas are in a relatively waterproof box, which sits in a huge ziplock baggie that is really standing up to the rain. This is connected to the controller via a SHIELDED cable. The controller is grounded.
NOTHING CHANGES in this experiment but swapping the CAT5 from the router (and just laying the end down by the board) and picking up the UNshielded CAT5 short patch cord that runs over to the NetGear.
With CAT5 hard wired to the router, I have a relatively quiet appearing, but not perfect oscilloscope tracing. When the huge storms moved through the midwest earlier, I was getting efficiencies upwards of 80%, usually never below 40% and sometimes was 3rd to 8th in rankings for the US.
I plugged the NetGear in, and rebooted the RED. Now I'm running 4% or so efficiency and the baseline seems to be noiser, with similar autoset gains.
I have swapped back and forth twice, and the huge falloff in efficiencies and the perceived noise in the baseline follow as I've described.
I am going to be ticked off if all the effort to move the antennas away from the house, and therefore dependent upon the wireless adapter NetGear to be in the picture, since there is no way I can run CAT5 out to that building. Radio waves go there very nicely.
Anyone ever hear of this before or have a clue what I might try? I'd think that using WiFi vs. the CAT5 would actually improve things, since there are no long UNshielded runs of CAT5 that might act like a noise antenna.
I have not touched the antennas, the preamp nor the run of shielded cable in, nor even the location of the board on my table, nor dressed or tweaked the wires coming and going to the board.
Very strange, or so I think.