It just started two days ago. No new electrical devices. Our 2.4 GHz cordless phone developed a high pitched background sound. You can hear the voices OK, but the sound gets on your nerves. I bought a new phone. The new phone has the same high pitched background sound. We do have 2.4GHz wireless, but have for years and it nothing had changed. What might be causing this annoying noise?
Unplug all your phones from the phone jacks in the house (yes, all of them) for about 15-20 minutes.
Then plug them all back in and see what happens.
This is what the phone company will have you do as step numero uno.
Amazingly, it worked for me.
Thanks for the tip. I will try that when I get home.
Any idea as to why this works, or what happened to cause it?
Nuclear overhauser induced heterodyning of your home’s EM bubble, via a standing wave resonance with the local Heaviside layer? It’d take a few minutes for the field to dissipate after you unplug.
You can try unplugging every device in your house while listening to see if that sound goes away.
If you have a way to power your cordless phone during a power outage, such as a UPS you could plug that phone into, then kill the power via the main circuit breaker of your house and see if the sound is still there.
If the sound is gone then some device inside your house is causing interference. To find the device shut off all breakers, then turn them on one at a time, listening for the sound to come back. Once you have found the circuit, turn that breaker back off and everything else back on. Now you have narrowed the interference to whatever is now off. You will have to experiment by unplugging things from here, but it may even be a illuminated dimmer light switch which is causing it, or some other thing that you can’t just unplug.
If the sound is still there, the interference may be caused by interference from the outside, perhaps relocating the phone to another section of the house would help.