Does shielded cable shield need to be earthed?

[SUNRAY]

Going back "a bit" I had a friend who was a radio amateur, and lived in a terrace. Similar to the above, his neighbour had TVI problems - each time he came banging on my friend's door he'd direct him to the Post Office to fill in a complaint form.
This went on for a bit, and eventually my friend got fed up and filled in a form on the neighbour's behalf. The neighbour was much more uoset then - he didn't have a TV licence !
As a postscript, my friend was in the post office about a week later - and the lasy behild the counter casually mentioned that she'd sold a dozen TV licences in his street that week.

As a radio Ham I got blamed for every blip and glitch, I have had 2 more sets of complaints from neighbours and the first thing I do is ask for dates and times to compare with my log book (no longer a legal requirement), they then come back a few days later with a list.
One list was obviously not my fault as it was right through the day, that turned out to be a local taxi company and I traced that to a rotted join in the aerial cable... and fixed it for them.
Other was continuous for several periods of 10 minutes every evening, that one was easy to identify, all I had to do was look for the purple lit window.
I did get to know the interference group very well and did spend some duties with them on, let's call it, unofficial training.

Part of my duties while working for BT was on loan to the TV detector vans, my job was to drive a van around housing estates very slowly, that was the van with blacked out windows so nobody was able to see how empty it was One of the tricks was to stop and shuffle the van back and forth every so often and take note of which lights changed.
The queue in the post offices the following day was comical, another job that went with the duty involved a camera and a queue.

 

[JohnW2]

As a radio Ham I got blamed for every blip and glitch ...

Same here, and my (very ancient) experiences were similar to what you describe.

Kind Regards, John

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

One list was obviously not my fault as it was right through the day, that turned out to be a local taxi company and I traced that to a rotted join in the aerial cable... and fixed it for them.

I had a similar problem with a local taxi base station. There transmitter was splashing 20Mhz either side of their frequency, I traced them to the address and then passed it to what is now Ofcom. Within days it was fixed, but chatting with Ofcom I found out they now use remote direction finding and monitoring stations, they don't so much go out in a DF van these days.

Another time, I tracked down an illegal operator and feeling generous I went round when he was operating, to knock on his door, rather than report him to the authorities. A separate flat, over a local shop - He answered the door with a Luger in hand.

 

[SUNRAY]

He answered the door with a Luger in hand.

Sadly firearms are not uncommon with illegal radio use.

On one of my outings with RFI guys we DF'd a pirate FM transmitter into a wooded area, I was about to walk towards it but the other guy used a weight on a string (think; grappling hook) and threw that in several times until it caught the trip wire attatched to a sawn off shot gun. After that we walked in and recovered everything into police custody except the car battery which went home with me.

 

[bernardgreen]

On one of my outings with RFI guys we DF'd a pirate FM transmitter

Late 1970's a pirate station in Ilford was transmitting on about 98 MHz which was the frequency of the LFB paging system and causing some problems. He made it very easy to locate him as he offered a phone in request service. Phoning the number during the day eventually some one answered, it was a phone box. At the next phone in session I had a chat with him. The phone box was across the road from the house where he lived with his parents. A few days later he was broadcasting when officers from Home Office rung his door bell and shut him down.