Not directly related to REIN, as such, but my findings may shed some light on what's going on with unlawful RF emitters.
We've just completed building a new low energy house, which happens to be down at the bottom of a valley, so is a bit of a radio blackspot. This means that any interference at all tends to be noticeable, on FM and AM radios. What we did find out, very early on, was that the majority of LED lighting power supplies were simply appalling at emitting broad band RFI. All the ones we purchased were CE marked, meaning they should have been tested for RF emissions (I used to be Head of Type Approval for all UK Maritime Radio, Radar and Navigation Equipment, and was a Notified Body under the EMC and Low Voltage Directive, with test labs etc).
I have a software defined radio (a cheap Chinese unit) that goes from 100KHz to 1.7GHz and with some open source software and a decent sniffer antenna it makes tracking RFI sources easy. What that showed me was that all of the LED power supplies we'd bought, from UK lighting suppliers, were falsely CE marked. All were made in China, and when I opened a few up to look inside found that none had even any basic EMI suppression or screening.
Places like Ebay and Amazon are awash with even worse bits of kit like this. In essence, the majority of devices with a switched mode power supply that I looked at, that came from the Far East, were illegal in terms of EMC compliance.
No one seems to be prepared to do anything about this, and TBH, the only reason I got interested in trying to sort it out was because of our poor radio reception and the interference whenever a light was turned on. My fix was to find some properly designed and manufactured power supplies, that did genuinely comply with the EMC Directive and which therefore didn't emit loads of broadband interference.
I still have the software defined radio, and can say that it's a very useful tool, when used with a simple spectrum analyser programme, for tracking down sources of interference. If people suspect REIN then it might be worth looking at some DIY testing with something relatively cheap like this in order to track down the source.
I very strongly suspect that it's a problem that is going to get a great deal worse as the number of cheap, non-compliant and falsely marked electronic devices increase. I spoke to Trading Standards and to the suppliers of the illegally marked items, but frankly had very little joy. One well-known DIY supplier did remove the offending LED lights from their range, and were honest enough to tell me that they relied on their supply chain to check what they were stocking, and that if something had a CE label on then they assumed that it was compliant with the EMC and LV Directives. As an aside, I can add that there are a lot of bits of kit that are CE marked and are electrically dangerous, as they don't comply with the LV Directive either.
I'm not sure if this helps, or not, but the figures quoted earlier for the percentage of faults that were found to be genuine REIN does not surprise me at all, neither do the items of equipment mentioned. It's a safe bet that anything unbranded with a switched mode power supply in it is going to be probable source of high amplitude RFI, and no one seems to really care about it too much.
If there's anything I can help with on the RFI/EMC side, or the sort of kit that's around to do rough and ready checks of the spectrum around lines, then I'm happy to help. The problem is getting the problem fixed! As mentioned earlier, no one has any real powers to confiscate illegally marked bits of electrical equipment that are radiating a lot of RFI, it seems.
Jeremy
