AC300 RFI experiences

Greetings, I wanted to share my experience with radio interference (RFI) issues emitted by the AC300’s inverter and MPPT charge controller (which is working fine as far as its PV-related work is concerned), in case anyone (I think few…) is interested in the topic.

Here is a link to a page with a brief description of the work performed to resolve the problem .

AC300 RFI

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Thanks that was useful. KI6LUY

@Ferruccio Thank you so much for sharing this! This will be helpful for BLUETTI AC300 users :)

Thanks for your work to try to cure the problem. One of the websites you link to that comments about the RFI problem, grouchyfarmer, is my blog. In my case I’m using an AC3200Max, but I’ve had exactly the same issues you’ve experienced. I’m an amateur radio operator also and thought I might use the Ac200Max as a power source for things like Field Day, etc. but the RFI issue put an end to that idea. That’s too bad because the AC200Max would have let me operate out in the wilds without a gas generator for a whole day or more.

One thing that did help was not connecting equipment directly to the AC200Max. I now use it to power the house’s electrical service through a manual transfer switch. Running it through the house’s wiring seems to help to filter out or suppress the worst of the RFI in some HF frequencies.

The response I got back from Bluetti indicates that they are aware of the situation but there really isn’t much they can do about it at this point.

Thanks for the comment, unfortunately the RFI problem is not much considered, not least because this means higher equipment production costs (and amateur radio operators are always a minority).

I remember about 30 years ago when I started ham radio, there were very few interference problems, now fate is sealed and it will be increasingly difficult to try to clean up the frequencies…

Thank you, very useful information. KC3VGH

You’re absolutely correct about that. RFI issues are generally the last thing that is considered when they’re designing products like this. I rather expected I would have issues so it wasn’t really a surprise. Solar charge controllers and inverters are rather notorious for RFI issues. As noted powering the house wiring rather than plugging directly into the AC200Max helped a lot. Before I did that 17 meters was almost completely useless but now it’s been remarkably better even when the system is charging off my solar panels. There is still considerable interference problems but by chance the FT8 waterholes all seem to fall between the spikes.

Hmm, I may have to dust off my Icom 7300 and see if that’s happening with the AC500. I haven’t been active since I moved to an HOA neighborhood and there are no tall trees around to string up a dipole. I had limited success with an inverted V 20’ high at the middle.
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Back before cable/satellite TV, someone would find out I was a ham operator and complain about TV interference the night before.
“Yeah, I was getting that too while trying to watch “Mash.” Someone should do something about them.” :wink:

Yes, a few decades ago it was amateur radio operators who were accused (often wrongly) of disturbances, TV in particular… the world changes, now we are on the other side… :wink:

I’m surprised you said it does not interfere with the wifi controls.
When I put my mobile phone in a faraday cage it is rendered to behave like airplane mode.
(No signal, wifi or cellular).
Perhaps it’s because the screen material you used faraday the faraday was different than used in my experiences. (which small cases were silver and the other I believe was aluminum)

Hi Rick, when I was building the cage I did a test by putting my mobile phone inside, and it worked normally (in fact I was already doubting what I was doing, but it turned out ok…).

However for me it was essential that the wi-fi worked because I need to control the AC300 remotely.

The sizes of the aluminium mesh are: 1.17 x 1.57 mm probably the one you used was finer (this is the link of the one I bought on Amazon (Amazon.it) : Aluminium Mosquito Screen )