[CoARES-D10] Oops I was wrong... Heres the articles.

[Randy Long]

I was wrong... here is the article

Following is a Wall Street Journal article concerning Amateur Radio and
BPL; followed by CQ Magazine response:
In This Power Play,
> High-Wire Act Riles
> Ham-Radio Fans
>
> New Use for Lines Sparks
> Tension With Operators;
> 'Firestorm' in Penn Yan
> By KEN BROWN
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
> March 23, 2004; Page A1
>
> Rick Lindquist drove down a street in a New York City suburb,
> ignoring the snow swirling around his car and twirling the dial
> on the ham radio mounted to the side of his dashboard. The radio
> picked up an operator in Minnesota discussing antennas, the
> Salvation Army's daily emergency network check and then the time,
> as broadcast from Colorado by the National Institute of Standards
> and Technology.
>
> As the car turned onto North State Road in the village of
> Briarcliff Manor in Westchester County, the voices faded,
> replaced with whirs and wahs -- what could have been sound
> effects from a 1950s science-fiction movie. The source, according
> to Mr. Lindquist, was right outside the window: the power lines
> running alongside the road.
>
> Owned by Consolidated Edison, the lines transmit not just
> electricity but data, much like phone and cable-TV wires. The
> utility is testing a system for reading meters, probing for
> outages and potentially offering high-speed Internet access to
> its customers via their electrical outlets. The interference from
> the power lines "ranges from very annoying to
> that's-all-I-can-hear," contends Mr. Lindquist, 58 years old, who
> often taps out Morse-code messages as he drives.
>
> In a clash between the dots and dashes of the telegraph and the
> bits and bytes of the Web, the nation's vocal but shrinking
> population of ham-radio operators, or "hams" as they call
> themselves, are stirring up a war with the utility industry over
> new power-line communications. Hams have flooded the Federal
> Communications Commission with about 2,500 letters and e-mails
> opposing power-line trials. In a letter to the FCC, the American
> Radio Relay League, a ham-radio group with 160,000 members,
> called power-line communications "a Pandora's box of
> unprecedented proportions."
>
>
> The league has raised more than $300,000 from nearly 5,600 donors
> since last summer, to pay for testing, lobbying and publicity to
> spread the word about the perceived threat. A half-dozen hams
> even confronted FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a big advocate of
> the power-line technology, when he visited a test site near
> Raleigh, N.C., earlier this month.
>
> The problem, most ham operators contend, is that power lines
> weren't built to carry anything other than electricity. Telephone
> and cable-TV lines are either shielded with a second set of wires
> or twisted together to prevent their signals from interfering
> with other transmissions. But signals sent over electrical wires
> tend to spill out, the hams contend.
>
> The FCC and the utilities say new technologies have eliminated
> the interference and accuse the hams of exploiting the issue for
> their own gains. "We haven't seen the sun darken and everything
> electrical turn to white noise and haze during a deployment,"
> says Matt Oja, an executive at Progress Energy, whose test Mr.
> Powell visited. "This is a fairly vocal group that has been
> whipped into a frenzy by their organization."
>
> The controversy comes at a sensitive time for the hams. Not too
> many decades ago, ham-radio operators were on the cutting edge of
> communications technology. They chatted with people in far-flung
> places at a time when long-distance calling was still a luxury.
> They spread word of disasters that otherwise might have taken
> days to reach the public. In the age of e-mail, wireless Internet
> access and cellphones that double as walkie-talkies, many
> operators worry that their hobby will fade away.
>
> To become a fully licensed ham operator, people still need to
> learn Morse code, though that requirement likely will be dropped
> soon after more than a decade of debate. Aging hams, who built
> crystal *******ets as kids or were radio operators during World
> War II, are dying. Fewer youngsters are replacing them. Armed
> with powerful computers, today's young tinkerers grow up to be
> tech geeks, playing videogames and writing software.
>
> The American Radio Relay League has seen its membership shrink to
> today's 160,000 from a peak of 175,000 in 1995, and the average
> member is in his mid-50s. The group estimates that there are
> about 250,000 active ham-radio enthusiasts.
>
> Hams always have been a quirky bunch. They haunt a series of
> short-wave radio frequencies set aside for them by the federal
> government in the 1930s. Other slices of the spectrum are
> reserved for AM and FM radio, broadcast television, cellphones,
> and police and fire departments, among other uses.
>
> Hams take great pride in radioing around the world. One favorite
> game: trying to contact someone in each of the 3,000-plus
> counties in the U.S. Mr. Lindquist is so enthusiastic about ham
> radio that he vacations in spots such as Whitehorse, the capital
> of Canada's Yukon Territory, so other hams can claim they made
> contact with that city.
>
> Ed Thomas, the FCC's chief engineer, says the commission has
> spent a year listening to the hams' concerns about power lines
> and is getting frustrated. "Why is this thing a major calamity?"
> he says. "And honestly, I'd love the answer to that."
>
> Companies such as Con Ed and Progress note that current FCC
> regulations call for systems to be shut down if they interfere
> with hams. The radio operators agree the rules are clear, but
> they fear they will be rescinded or not enforced.
>
> Con Ed says its system in Briarcliff Manor doesn't interfere with
> the hams and maintains that, in two years of testing, it hasn't
> received one complaint. But the American Radio Relay League says
> it did mention this system in its letters to the FCC, and it has
> been complaining about it on its Web site.
>
> The hams have been quick to act wherever systems are being rolled
> out. Just days after Penn Yan, a town of 5,200 that sits amid New
> York's Finger Lakes, approved a plan to test power-line Internet
> access, "the firestorm started with the ham-radio operators --
> letters, e-mails, telephone calls saying, 'You can't do this,' "
> recalls Mayor Doug Marchionda Jr.
>
> Hoping to keep everyone happy, he approached David Simmons, a
> local ham and owner of an electronics store that sells radio
> gear. They surveyed the town before the trial began to get base
> readings of interference. They even pinpointed a spot that had
> bothered police and firefighters for years, tracing it to
> refrigerators at a local supermarket.
>
> With the refrigerators fixed and the power-line system in place
> over nine blocks of Penn Yan, Mr. Simmons is satisfied that there
> is no interference and now favors the new technology. "This thing
> has caught quite a buzz," he says. "It's just so much negativity
> out there."
>
> Tom Gius, a ham-radio operator in Alpine, Texas, sees the power
> lines as a threat to the public services that hams provide. When
> hailstorms sweep through each spring, Mr. Gius heads to the local
> *******tation, while other hams fan out to the north, south, east
> and west. They communicate by radio, and Mr. Gius passes
> information to the *******tation. "We won't be able to understand
> each other, it'll be so noisy," frets Mr. Gius, a 60-year-old
> retired broadcaster.
>
> Write to Ken Brown at ken.brown@wsj.com
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------
Subject: [Satern] Response to WSJ article on Tuesday
March 25, 2004
To the editor:
As a journalist and an amateur radio operator (I am the editor of CQ Amateur
Radio, the world's
largest independent amateur radio magazine), I was distressed at the number
of significant
inaccuracies in Ken Brown's March 23 article, "In This Power Play, High-Wire
Act Riles Ham-
Radio Fans":
#1) "The nation's vocal but shrinking population of ham-radio operators"
isn't shrinking. The
number of licensed hams in the United States is near its all-time high (it
peaked last summer at
more than 685,000 and is currently around 684,000, according to FCC
statistics. In contrast,
there were 673,000 licensed hams at this time five years ago; in 1980, there
were about 382,000.
Far from shrinking, amateur radio in the United States is growing and has
nearly doubled its
ranks in the past 25 years.). The American Radio Relay League's membership
may have fallen
sharply in the past decade, but that has more to do with how the
organization is perceived by
many hams than with the number or licensed or even active hams.
#2) While "a clash between the dots and dashes of the telegraph and the bits
and bytes of the
Web" makes for nice copy, it doesn't paint a very accurate picture. While
Morse code certainly
continues to be popular among hams it gets through in marginal conditions
when virtually nothing
else will, and you need only your brain to decode it, not a computer hams
primarily communicate
using voice, digital modes (we invented wireless e-mail networks in the
1980s) and yes, even the
internet to connect with other hams around the world. I am currently
reviewing a device that
generates and decodes digital voice signals that are sent through standard
analog transmitters
and receivers.
#3) "Not too many decades ago, ham-radio operators were on the cutting edge
of
communications technology ... They spread word of disasters that otherwise
might have taken
days to reach the public." No, not too many decades ago at all in fact, the
correct number of
decades is zero. There is a permanent ham station at the National Hurricane
Center that's staffed
whenever a hurricane is near land. Why? Because when power lines and
telephone lines go
down in a storm, ham radio is STILL the only means of communication that
reliably gets through
in those critical early hours. When the attacks of 9/11 destroyed New York
City's ultra-high-tech
Office of Emergency Management, officials relied on ham radio during those
critical early hours to
relay vital communications between agencies. One FCC official has correctly
described amateur
radio as America's "fail-safe communications system."
#4) As for suggestions that we are losing our edge in technology, how many
other hobbyist
groups have their own fleet of communications satellites ... that they've
built themselves? Hams
around the world have built and launched about 60 satellites since 1961,
when we launched the
first non-government satellite ever placed into orbit. Hams today are
extending the distance limits
of high-microwave frequencies, the next "frontier" for wireless
communications; and
experimenting with laser communications. Today's "hot ticket" technologies
such as wide-area
wireless computer networking; and text-messaging and still-picture
transmissions via cell-phones,
were pioneered by hams.
#5) "To become a fully-licensed ham operator, people still need to learn
Morse code..." ... not
since 1991, when the code requirement was dropped for the Technician class
license, which
gives full privileges in the VHF and UHF amateur allocations. Hams with
Technician licenses are
"fully-licensed." Other license classes with additional privileges continue
to require a code exam,
but at only 5 words per minute, and that only because it was required by
international rules until
last summer. The FCC is currently considering more than a dozen petitions to
bring US rules into
line with the new international regulations.
#6) "Aging hams ... are dying." Yup, along with aging non-hams. Not much we
can do about that,
except to note that hams and non-hams alike are living longer today so
they're not dying quite as
soon as they might have a couple of decades ago. "Fewer youngsters are
replacing them." This
is hard to quantify since new privacy rules no longer allow the FCC to
collect and release birth
dates of licensees. But there are two factors at play here that skew the
average age figures: a)
there are fewer youngsters, period. The baby boom created a huge population
bubble that is
working its way into its 60s, and the average age for any activity that
includes baby boomers is
inexorably rising; b) many of those boomers are becoming hams for the first
time in their 50s and
60s, pushing up the average age. With today's advances in health care, these
new hams often
have 20-30 years in which they can be active, contributing members of the
ham radio community.
And since many of them are retired, they have the time to give to staffing
emergency operating
centers, etc., and providing vital communications in disasters. These
older-newer hams are
assets, not liabilities.
# 7) Hams "haunt a series of short-wave radio frequencies set aside for them
by the federal
government in the 1930s." While some frequency bands were assigned to
amateurs
(internationally) in the 1930s, we have seen a steady growth in those
allocations in more recent
decades. Three new allocations were made in the 1980s and one was made just
last year. The
picture Mr. Brown paints of hams as ghosts of communications past
("haunting" frequencies since
the '30s, for example), is just plain inaccurate.
#8) "One favorite game: trying to contact someone in each of the 3,000-plus
counties in the U.S."
As sponsors of the primary award for contacting all 3,077 U.S. counties, we
are proud that it's a
favorite activity. But it's much more than a game. Since many remote
counties don't have many
resident hams, "county-hunters" often put them on the air by driving there
and operating from
their cars. This gives hams around the world experience in communicating
with stations whose
signals might be weak signals Broadband over Power Lines would likely wipe
out; and it gives
the hams who drive to those counties a knowledge of places from which they
can operate and get
signals out essential knowledge in an emergency or disaster. Better to take
the hours you might
need to find those locations while pursuing the hobby aspect of amateur
radio than to waste time
searching for a spot in an emergency when every minute counts.
#9) Mr. Brown poses a question asked by FCC Chief Engineer Ed Thomas, "Why
is this thing a
major calamity?" but he doesn't try to get an answer. Here's the answer: One
of the many things
hams have discovered over the years about the short-wave frequencies where
BPL wants to
operate is that you don't need a lot of power to communicate over very great
distances. Under the
right conditions, a few milliwatts might get you a contact thousands of
miles away. BPL signals
are essentially low-power radio transmissions. Under those same conditions,
they may bounce off
the ionosphere like any other *******ignal and come back down hundreds or
thousands of miles
away. Rather than enhancing communication, though, they will block it. Hams
tuning around the
short-wave frequencies searching for a weak signal from some remote corner
of the globe won't
be able to hear it and they also won't be able to hear the weak distress
signal from a boat in the
middle of the ocean somewhere that's in danger of sinking, something that
happens at least once
or twice a year.
#10) Hams are not the only ones threatened by BPL interference. Every other
user of spectrum
between 2 MHz and 80 MHz is at risk. This includes international short-wave
broadcasters, the
US military, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, long-distance airline
pilots, Citizens
Band (CB), some radio-control airplanes and boats, some baby monitors and
cordless phones,
and some police and fire departments. The FCC and BPL industry say they'll
avoid using certain
frequencies where interference occurs, but with so many spectrum users, and
the possibility of
interference occurring hundreds or thousands of miles from the signals'
source, this "notching"
technique will soon result in "all hole and no doughnut." It just won't
work. Someone inevitably will
suffer interference. And once BPL is widely deployed, it will be virtually
impossible to un-deploy.
Perhaps a better question for Mr. Brown to be asking than "Why is this thing
a major calamity?" is
"Why is BPL so important to the FCC?" It is FCC policy not to promote any
one particular
technology, yet from Chairman Powell on down to the staff level, this policy
is being violated with
regularity as the FCC has become cheerleaders for a technology with
potential for massive
interference to a host of long-distance *******ervices and whose economic
potential is unproven
at best. Why is BPL so important to the FCC? It's a question that may well
be worth the curiosity
of the Journal's excellent investigative staff.
Thank you for the opportunity to correct the inaccuracies in Mr. Brown's
article.
Sincerely,
Richard Moseson
Editor, CQ Amateur Radio magazine
25 Newbridge Rd.
Hicksville, NY 11801
516-681-2922
w2vu@cq-amateur-radio.com