Spring 2004 Issue

Because of the importance of the Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) issue, “FM” columnist Gary Pearce, KN4AQ, devotes his space this time to the investigation of a BPL test site and the surrounding area. He will be back in the next issue of CQ VHF with his regular column material. —N6CL

Since last fall, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in BPL—Broadband over Power Lines—and its effect on amateur radio. If you’re up on current TV culture, you can call it “HF Eye for the FM Guy.” Our area has been “lucky” enough to host one of the few BPL trials, courtesy of my local power company, Progress Energy, and equipment vendor Amperion. Several other local hams and I have been very busy learning about BPL, measuring the effects, working with the power company and vendor, and relaying what we’ve learned to our fellow hams. I thought you might be interested in a fairly intimate review of what I’ve been going through. It’s not nearly over, but the deadline looms. They say that writers should write about what they know, and right now this is what I know. This will be a deep breath for me, and maybe some catch-up for you. Here we go.

Here we stop. I suppose I need to make sure you know what BPL is. It certainly has been the buzz of ham radio this winter, but there’s a lot of misinformation about it. I’m always running into hams who have heard the initials but they only have a fuzzy idea of the basics, which is not surprising. For 99.9% of hams, BPL is still academic. They haven’t encountered it yet. I will provide a quick tutorial.

The basics of BPL are simple. It is a method of delivering high-speed internet to homes and small businesses using the local power lines that crisscross neighborhoods either overhead or underground. This is a brilliantly obvious idea (“the wires are already there!”) that was delayed because the AC power grid is a really noisy, crappy signal-delivery medium for anything above 60 Hz. The march of technology, however, is making it feasible. It is the third method of doing that, following DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) on the phone lines and cable TV (nobody’s come up with a cute name or acronym for broadband over cable TV; they just call it “cable”). Actually, wide-area wireless using microwave frequencies is really the “third” method of delivery, but it doesn’t seem to be lighting any fires in the imaginations of the industry press, the public, or the FCC, the way BPL is (too bad). I’m told that it’s a better system.

 

Click here to return to this month's highlights

Click here to subscribe to VHF and read more about The BPL Dilemma

_________________

© Copyright 2004, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.