Head light static

Three questions;

First question, is your power for the radio coming from the battery?

Second is have you determined where it is coming from?

What I mean is it a power supply source to the radio or is it an antenna source.

How you tell is you can disconnect the antenna and turn down the RF gain, if you still hear the noise, then it is a power supply source for the noise.

Third question (A two part one really ) and more importantly.

Does the noise change when you put on the high beams?

Are you running HID lights?

 

OK who made the LED lights?

 

Another question where did you get the lights?

 

What do you mean you tried a different brand of lights?

You mean LED lights?

OK I know this is frustrating so I will cut to the chase.

LED lights made by companies that import them and are branded by the manufacturer usually are crap. I know a lot about importing these things, and deal with some of these manufacturers for my daughter's venture. A lot of times the same innards will be used for maybe 100 different styles, and it is still the same crap.

These lights don't pass the FCC requirements for noise or RF radiation levels and cause all kinds of crap.

So to explain it a little further these lights have little miniature power supplies in them and they are what is called a switching power supply, they use a high frequency to switch little transistors on and off to power the lights at a constant voltage and current. LED lights have to have low current to run or they blow up.

Now some of these power supplies are a chip with a coil and a few other components, they are not shielded correctly or even in a few cases of testing them, the chips themselves are knock offs and are pure crap.

NOW this is an issue with LED grow lights, some ham radio operators can't even listen to their HF radios because some clown has a grow light three or four blocks away, and it crease so much interference that it blankets the entire area. This happens a lot, it happened where i used to live with my next door neighbor and his grow lights, I could not listen to AM radio.

The bad news is that really there isn't much you can do about it, you can't change a thing in the truck or in the radio, the lights admit so much noise that it blankets the area with interference.

By the way a while back I did some work on a Cascadia, we tore the entire truck apart and one of the tests we did was to find where the noise was coming from within the truck, I have a special receiver just for this test, and it turned out the body computer was really noisy. I've tested a few grow lights with the same setup, and only found one that was quiet.

SO here is the suggestion, get a pair of trucklite LED lights (these do work well), dump the other lights and should not have an issue after that.

 

Switch to JW Speaker 8700 Evolution 2 headlights. Vastly superior to anything else on the market, and American made. Pricey, but extremely high quality. you do typically get what you pay for.

 

Thank you volvo, I've been looking at them for the little jeep my son got before he left for the Air Force. I thought I would surprise him with modifying it a bit.

 

If it's a JK Wrangler they have a version specific for that, the 8700 Evolution J.