[Lowfer] Progress comes to the boondocks

[Lyle Koehler]

This afternoon a guy from the local electric utility came and replaced my
old electric meter with one of the new-fangled remote reading units.

Q: How does it work?

A: It sends pulsed signals via the power lines to the central office.

Q: All the time or just once a month?

A: All the time.

Q: Will it cause radio interference?

A: We have had no complaints. (Why didn't that make me feel any better?)

I now hear very strong pulsed noise across the entire LF (30-300 kHz)
spectrum. The noise tapers off rapidly above 300 kHz, and is essentially
gone by 500 kHz. Noise blankers in both of my receivers (IC-756PRO and
IC-706) are fairly effective in suppressing the noise, to the point where I
would be able to hear local LowFERs in aural CW mode. It is difficult to say
how much effect this will have on weak-signal reception, but it certainly
won't help! A composite picture showing Argo spectrograms of the noise in
full-band and 3-second dot modes can be seen at
http://www.qsl.net/k0lr/PLC-meter.jpg

For these captures, the receiver was set to 185.000 kHz in USB mode. In the
lower half of the full-band view, the IC-756PRO's noise blanker was off; in
the top half it was turned on. "Ribbons" of noise appear at intervals of 60
Hz. The screen capture in 3-second dot mode shows a zoomed-in picture of the
noise spectrum with the noise blanker off. 300 Hz, the center of the
display, corresponds to 185.300 kHz.

I've already called the power company, and there is a possibility that they
will re-install my old meter. However, there was some BS about an extra
charge to send someone out every month to read it! An engineer from the
power company is supposed to call me next week to discuss the problem. In
the meantime, I may be doing a lot of transmitting and not much listening.

If I lived in the big city, there would be one of those @#5&!! things on
every house in the neighborhood. Things could be worse...

Lyle, K0LR