[KYHAM] BPL's effect on amateur radio more serious than you think

[Bill Fuqua]

	Just about all the effort to solve the problems with BPL and Amateur Radio 
has been focused on the interference caused to the Amateur Radio operations 
by the BPL systems. The Power Companies can easily have the FCC ignore all 
the Amateur comments by simply saying that they will make sure their 
systems will not produce signals on amateur bands. That is what HomePlug 
did. The ARRL got with HomePlug Alliance  and they programmed the DSPs to 
not produce signals in ham bands.
The BPL supporters and the ARRL  will do the same thus making almost all 
the comments by amateurs irrelevant.
	Once BPL is in wide use and it is discovered that Ham Transmitters 
overload the wide band electronics their modems, there will be a great 
effort to force hams either to stop transmitting or greatly reduce power. I 
am sure they will put in band reject filters for CB (no regulatory control) 
but it would be too costly to put in effective narrow band passive reject 
filters for 80,60,40,30,17,15,12,10 and 6 meter bands. The analog to 
digital converters in these devices will be easily overloaded by signals 
from a ham antenna coupling  into the power lines (BPL antenna).
	The power companies want to get into more than the e-mail market. They 
want into the pay-per-view movie ,  telephone   and internet markets. This 
means that a single ham transmitter could knock out BPL (VoIP) phones in an 
entire neighborhood. The results would be a number of angry customers and 
also a concern about safety for those that are in poor health or have 
young  children.  This could be considered as a disruption to an utility. 
There are already laws on the books that have serious penalties for the 
disruption of utilities and possibly worse penalties under the umbrella of 
Homeland Security. These issues would not be necessarily between just the 
FCC and the Ham. A ham could be arrested and charged by local authorities.
	This may only be prevented by passing the Amateur Radio Spectrum 
Preservation Act but I am not sure that it would prevent the above 
situation from happening. I imagine that the power companies and others are 
doing their best to block the Amateur Radio Spectrum Preservation Act. If 
the FCC should allow BPL it must be made clear in the ruling that licensed 
services will not be affected in any way by the incompatibility between BPL 
and those licensed services. If there is any problem with the compatibly 
between a licensed service and a BPL system, the power company must solve 
it even if it requires the power company to refund the BPL users money and 
offer an alternate means of communication.