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Old 11-09-2011, 04:43 PM   #194 (permalink)
Vaughanabe13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by spearfish25 View Post
It sounds like your ears are ringing and you'll hear it best with your right ear directed at the passenger footwell. That's where the ECM is located which is the culprit. For the engineering types, it sounds like a highly charged capacitor. Think of your really old tube TV when you turn it on....high pitch noise.
A "highly charged capacitor" is not correct, but it is most likely an issue with one or more capacitors. Ceramic capacitors are piezoelectric so an applied voltage will cause mechanical strain, and thus audible noise. They probably used ceramic caps with a high dialectric constant and these are affected by temperature so the ambient temperature in the car and the temperature on the ECU board will likely effect how much you hear the noise. The noise could also be harmonic distortion from a capacitor that has a rapidly changing applied voltage, such as a switching power supply.

Any way you cut it, the board was not designed properly by the engineers and it sounds like a subsequent PCB revision has fixed the issue.
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