On 12/23/05, Joy Hecht <jhecht@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> I've had two things weird happen in my van lately, was wondering if either
> has happened to anyone else.
>
> First - while driving, I'm listening to the radio, and I plug my cellphone
> charger into the cigarette lighter to charge the phone.  All of the sudden
> I'm getting truly weird spacey noises

Such chargers use a DC-DC converter to charge the phone battery (5-7v) off
the car battery (12-14v). Cheap chargers (which pretty much all of them are,
unfortunately) use cheap converters than put out a lot of radio frequency
noise, and the noise can sound pretty weird sometimes.

Second - While not driving, I plugged in my clock-radio in the evening to my
> (cheap) inverter and thence into my extra battery.  Set the clock, but in
> the morning it's half an hour fast.  The first time it happened, I figured
> I'd set it wrong, but the second time I realized it wasn't me.
>

Your clock radio is apparently one of the kind that depend on the 60hz
(cycles-per-second) nature of normal wall current to keep time. Inverters
generate an adequate facsimile of AC wall current to drive most devices that
need it, but the waveform is often rather more square than sine-wave, and
frequently it's not exactly 60hz either. Some clocks can be thrown off by
that.

--
John Bange
'90 Vanagon - "Geldsauger"