LEDs – light emitting DIODES, (note the word DIODE) have always been noise generators.
In fact, they’re used to make ‘noise generators’ – that are actually useful for creating noise over a wide spectrum. Very useful when designing or aligning electronic equipment. You can even use one to tune an antenna!
Yep, known for many, many years – a common trick mobile radio (yeah boats too) installers/enthusiasts used way back in the 1920’s and up! LEDs, of course, weren’t around then, but diodes have been in use for a long time. Most commonly used to convert AC electricity to DC electricity. Diodes only let current travel in one direction and block in the other.
The noise depends on the chaotic movements (the blocking) of the electrons in the diode itself. From that, this “thermal” noise is known as white noise (from optical physics) as it fills the whole spectrum. From an electronics point of view the noise causes big limitations to our devices for example amplifiers, instruments, radars, receivers, electro-medical, etc…. (Read – your vessel’s radio).
LED lighting is very popular nowadays, and so are found everywhere. The whole RF (radio/TV/radar etc.) frequency spectrum has become very noisy because of this along with the digital conversion to analog appliances. Even your current receivers use digital circuitry (noisy) to operate.
Yep – digital is great, does many things ‘better’ – BUT as always in the world of physics – the actual world we live in – not necessarily BETTER. You will always have to give up something to get something in physics. The powers that be gave us all of this. You can mess with it all you want – BUT YOU CAN NEVER CHANGE THE LAW OF PHYSICS. Simple to understand – right? It’s ‘simply’ always going to be that way – PERIOD.
So, the next time you whine about poor radio performance because of noise – just remember what the law of physics says…
Maybe LED lighting (and digital in general) manufacturers will expand products using them to figure out how to get rid of noise – we’d ALL like that!!
More information can be found here – https://www.oceannavigator.com/led-lights-could-cause-vhf-radio-interference/