[CW] BPL

[Gregory W. Moore]

GA John, for a second I thought you meant Brass Pounders League --hi---

Anyhow, I wanted to make a point that if there are any "unbelievers" out 
there concerning the fiasco which will result from
the introduction of BPL, I would like to bring up the first of the 
troublemakers, remote meter reading.  Now, last year, our local power 
company (PECO Energy) installed remote reading meters in all the 
residences. 

    There is, apparently a distance limit,  because they do have small 
tranciever assemblies mounted at various points along the secondaries, 
of which I still have to discover the operating frequency (it looks 
about 800-900Mhz from the extremely small yagis which are used). At any 
rate, immediately upon the installation of the remote reading system, I 
began experiencing an extremely sudden increase in power line noise, 
pops, cracks, and what sounded like relatively slow baudrate fsk. The 
upside, to this of course, is that the activity is not a 24/7 
operation,  and  I also believe, that since  the power companines have 
routinely used  power line carrier signals to control  "peak usage" 
services  (those having elecric water heaters, or any other high 
consumption power items, which are on a separate meter and turned off 
during certain peak usage hours) they used to use clocks in the meter, 
but have now gone to electronic switching. This doesn't seem to cause 
any problems at all that I have noticed.  This being said, that BPL is 
going to create a virtually unlimited array of harmonics, and they are 
going to be LOUD!
This is definitely NOT telephone-quality technology, and each and every 
bad connection is a rectifier, and there are a lot of bad connections 
out there.

If you consider the fact that my residence is a "row house" (a whole 
street of homes joined by common firewalls), and a lot of
those homes have lousy service entrance connections, corrosion, and 
whatever else can go wrong, the potential for power line interference is 
high. The interference just from the meter reading, however, is enough 
to be problematic, and a passive antenna/ mixer solved that problem at 
least for now, as I can null out darn near anything that comes my way.  
I can't knock the Power Company, though, as they really came through for 
me when I was installing a 90' B&W 180-10 folded dipole, and allowed me 
to use the streetlamp pole in front of my house as one of the endpoints, 
including drilling the holes and installing ringbolts, and have always 
come thru both for MARS and Amateur Radio.

At any rate, the experience with the remotely read meters definitely 
makes a believer out of one, and real quickly. I seriously doubt, if BPL 
were to be implemented, that the harmonics induced by a broadband signal 
could be nulled out by any of the standard technology we have in place 
at this time.  HF, as we know it, would be rendered virtually useless.

73 de Greg WA3IVX / NNN0BVN

.

n3drk wrote:

>This is somewhat off topic but wanted to share with the group. If you want
>to hear what Broadband over Power Line (BPL) sounds like, go to
>
>http://www.qsl.net/rsgb_emc/pltsounds.html
>
>and try all three audio downloads. This will give one exposure.
>
>john
>
>
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-- 
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
                                                   --Edmund Burke

Greg Moore NNN0BVN PA
U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS)
Official Pennsylvania Area Website:
http://pages.prodigy.net/nnn0fbk/mars.htm
Official Northeast Area Website: 
http://www.navymars.org/northeast/index.htm
Navy-Marine Corps MARS: Proudly Serving Those Who Serve."
E-Mail (MARS) nnn0bvn@navymars.org
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