BPL is out

I misunderstood your subject, BPL is being tried. I hoped it was OUT of the question. mk

From the article.

"Despite continuing concerns over interference expressed by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is confident those issues can be worked out, said Tom Sullivan, chief of the Spectrum Engineering Branch at the agency. "

Now what radios are interfered with from a 60 Hz powerline?

It's not the power line but the broadband signal travelling on the line. The line now becomes one massive antenna!

| From the article. | | "Despite continuing concerns over interference expressed by the | American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the U.S. National | Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is confident | those issues can be worked out, said Tom Sullivan, chief of the | Spectrum Engineering Branch at the agency.

Of course, `worked out' means telling the ham radio operators and shortwave listeners to `go take a hike'. They've started a BPL test in Burnet, TX and the hams there have reported that the BPL has basically made the HF bands totally unusable.

The recent FCC ruling on BPL stated which bands must not be interfered with -- there's emergency traffic on those bands. Alas, they left off the ham bands, the bands that are the most likely to be affected, since they deal the most with weak signals.

| " | | Now what radios are interfered with from a 60 Hz powerline?

Just about all of them, of course. As long as they're close enough.

The power may be at 60 Hz, but power lines DO generate noise on other frequencies, even without BPL.

For the most part, the interference is very weak, but when you have connections that aren't very good you can get arcing, and that generates LOTS of noise, and yes, it's connected to a nice big antenna.

Also, many power companies have used something similar to BPL to read data from their electrical meters for a long time now. This generates a little bit of noise, though it's MUCH less than BPL will generate. (It also tends to not work very well. You'd think they'd realize that BPL will have similar issues.)

And to keep this all relevant to R/C, the recent FCC BPL ruling allows BPL to be used to to 80 mHz ... can anybody think of anything related to this newsgroup that uses a frequency between 2 mHz and 80 mHz?

Get enough power behind it and frequency becomes a moot point!

Read that again, this guy was saying that existing power lines cause radio interferance not BPL.

One guy made that assertion in partial rebuttal to BPL being a problem. Here is the real problem: "They've started a BPL test in Burnet, TX and the hams there have reported that the BPL has basically made the HF bands totally unusable."

Almost all as it happens.

Well they do, but not quite to the same extent.

But of course, with Bush still in, its sod teh little guys and make money: Business as usual.

What did you expect?

^^^^^^^ I thought that they only had fruitcakes in Texas?

And this is why this ng is of almost no value anymore. It's been overun by boobery.

Having beeen a ham operator for a long time , i can tell you that power lines do create noise across a large spectrum if there is degredation of the insulation or bad connections as do bad spark plugs, lightning strikes and arc welders. Hams tend not to buy homes near high lines. Sometimes the noise gets worse when it rains or the wind blows, and cold weather. There can also be a corona discharge that can be noisey. Mabye the guy reasoned that if we put up with power line noise then we should be able to tolerate BPL interference. Wierd logic.

Mabye the solution is to raise the channel frequencies up into VHF region. Most of the r/c flying is done line of sight anyways so it shouldnt matter.

Sport_Pilot wrote:

No those all live in Austin...trust me. I think Leslie is still riding his bicycle around town in his night gowns(he has good taste though).

Thick headed yes...fruitcake? Naw more of an "AngelFood Cake" light and fluffy with little substance. But I hear he rides in the neatest 747 since the Austin Power edition flew. It's "shagadelic baby". Any way idiots don't survive flying an F102A.

"Frank Costa" wrote in message news:1kdrd.8440$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net...

and fools who top post.

| Having beeen a ham operator for a long time , i can tell you that power | lines do create noise across a large spectrum if there is degredation of | the insulation or bad connections as do bad spark plugs, lightning | strikes and arc welders. Hams tend not to buy homes near high lines.

Hams also tend to not buy houses in areas where the covenants don't allow the consutruction of antennas, but ... here I am.

| Mabye the guy reasoned that if we put up with power line noise then | we should be able to tolerate BPL interference. Wierd logic.

It's reasonable logic, except that the BPL intereference will be much much stronger, being emitted from every power line supporting BPL, not just the (hopefully) small areas where there's some bad insulators.

And a call to the electric company (or PUC or FCC if the electric company doesn't listen) is a lot less likely to get it fixed, since for BPL all that noise is `working as designed'.

| Mabye the solution is to raise the channel frequencies up into VHF | region. Most of the r/c flying is done line of sight anyways

Most? I don't know about you, but if I'm flying out of my line of sight, it's because something went wrong and my plane is about to crash :) (Though to be fair, I did once lose my plane that way, and I put down my transmitter and went to make the `walk of shame' to go look for my plane, and suddenly it popped back up into the sky :) )

| so it shouldnt matter.

VHF, UHF or even higher would work fine for our uses. Since a new band would also require new equipment, it would also be a perfect opportunity to switch to spread spectrum radios (by allowing only spread spectrum on the new band.)

However, it hasn't been shown that BPL is a problem for R/C yet. The signals we deal with are much stronger than what hams deal with -- the lower power hams regularly talk to people 500 miles away with 1/2 watt of power -- and we use the same amount of power to talk to a plane almost never more than 0.5 miles away. And I don't think BPL is using frequencies over 30 mHz anywhere yet anyways. Yet.

And even when/if BPL does extend to our bands, and it turns out to be a big problem, it seems unlikely that the FCC would give us a new band. As far as they're concerned, spectrum is money. Currently, we have about 0.5 mHz of spectrum (for planes, anyways) -- but in 1994,

0.45 mHz of bandwidth was auctioned for $395 million dollars . Is our (current) spectrum really worth that much, or have I made a mistake here?

It sure beats having to scroll down through the nonsense that a person like you posts to read enlightened responses. The internet is full of sour grapes, feelings of jealous impotent rage, and misguided childish useless rantings this past month, interesting. It would be troubling if it wasn't so funny and satisfying at the same time.

"Frank Costa" wrote in message news:Yfsrd.5231$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...

Thank you for proving my point...plonk.

A: Because it interupts the natural flow of conversation.

Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?