[Elecraft] BPL

[Brendan Minish]

At 11:30 16/08/2003, Dan Allen wrote:
>The damage would be far worse than September 11th.
>At any rate, the reason most power lines are underground on continental
>Europe is that they have been through two world wars in the last hundred
>years.  They understand.


Most lines are NOT underground in Europe! Like everywhere else putting 
lines underground is a very expensive exercise.

About 6 moths ago I had an interference problem (RFI) from a 10 Kv (medium 
voltage) line, it was when I found it over 2 1/2 miles from my Shack.
The Irish electricity company (ESB) were happy to fix the problem, once I 
had located it since faults repaired in nice weather during working hours 
are far preferable to emergency repairs at night in high winds..

the k2 (with it's internal battery ) was a most useful too for finding the 
general area where the problem was. I was then able to identify the 
individual pole by using a scanner in AM mode and a 70Cm beam.

The whole exercise taught me a few things
1/ Generally the electricity folks take RFI seriously around here as it is 
usually the precursor of a fault of some kind.

  They also like been brought directly to the problem, It can take them 
days to find RFI problems, especially intermittent ones so if you want 
something fixed it's going to help a lot if you do some legwork.

2/ Power lines make wonderful antenna systems  :-( this does not bode well 
for the impact of BPL if deployed.

If you have the need to find & identify power line related RFI may I 
recommend this most useful (& free )  book, available in electronic form here.

Power-Line Noise Mitigation Handbook for Naval and Other Receiving Sites
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/power_line_handbook/

73
Brendan EI6IZ