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Mixed Conclusions About Powerline Networking vs. Ham Radio
Barence writes "Since writing about the success he's had with powerline networking, a number of readers emailed PC Pro's Paul Ockendon to castigate him for recommending these products, such as HomePlug. They were all amateur radio enthusiasts, claiming the products affect their hobby in much the same way that urban lighting affects amateur astronomers, but rather than causing light pollution they claim powerline networking causes radio pollution in the HF band (otherwise known as shortwave). Paul's follow-up feature, 'Does powerline networking nuke radio hams?' documents his investigation into these claims, which found evidence to support both sides of an intriguing debate."
It's a volunteer emergency communications organisation.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's not a debate. Doing this turns those power lines into big antennas. You can't debate the laws of physics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The other is within-home networking like Homeplug. ARRL dealt with early interference issues and has not reported any recent ones as far as I'm aware. But the very earliest models allowed us to hear your phone call on shortwave! Fortunately, people who owned those were found and warned, for the most part.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It's an elitist hobby for techno-geeks
Funny, I feel the same way about World of Warcraft.
Props to the egghead who called me after Katrina with a message from my sister saying she was okay.
Yeah, there's no better alternatives to using powerline networking. It's not like you can buy CAT6 at Home Depot, or anything.
Unlike the buggy whip people, Ham operators have constantly come up with new stuff, like figuring out how to make shortwaves go across an ocean. Powerline networking, OTOH, is a cheap stopgap solution that's better done by laying dedicated cable or setting aside radio frequencies for the task.
Not a typewriter
I prefer my hams honey glazed and baked rather than microwaved anyway.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
As much as I hate responding to flame-bait, I just have to mention that HF is still used for many real-world purposes. Here in Australia, it is used to educate kids in the outback, as well as for public safety communications. There are many more reasons to keep using HF, I can't see it dying any time soon.
Anonymous Coward
"keeping the HF bands clear for low signal communication is a bit like keeping the rail tracks clear of fast express trains so that nostalgists can run steam trains over them."
The author's analogy belies the fatal flaw in his though process: HF communications may be older and slower than the internet, but the internet is highly unreliable and fails when communications are most critical. HF always works. HF is the ONLY completely reliable means of long-distance communication that humans have. To destroy mankind's sole means of completely reliable communication in favor of a system which fails when needed most is simply foolish. This isn't about amateur radio. It's merely incidental that most HF communications these days are by hams, and that hams handle disaster comms when the networks go down. These communications could be handled by any group of people, and the result would be the same: without a reliable HF infrastructure, humans screw themselves doubly when nature screws us.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Power lines were never meant to carry RF energy. When they are, they radiate. Cable TV doesn't radiate. It doesn't radiate because it uses a proper transmission medium (Coax). If the power line folks want to distribute DATA, they should string the poles with fiber optic. Better yet, we the people should string it, and sell access to the content providers.. ala municipal fiber networks. They can work folks!
-=[ place
I doubt any EM leaked out of that house.
Except out the power lines that are good at radiating RF outside the house just like they are good at carrying RF inside the house. At least until they reach a transformer.
Wake up. BPL is a crappy technology. It guarantees improper radiation because the power lines aren't shielded at the physical layer. Kill BPL now and demand what we all want: Fiber Optic.
-=[ place
HAM radio. It's an obsolete elitist hobby for techno-geeks. Let it die.
/. ? Lots of HAM radio operators are here, they tend to have an excellent karma and lots of mod bullets in their magazine.
You dare to say this on
Frequency planning is an area you would need to study further before you could make sensible statements about it. Sorry, and good luck if you do decide to look into it.
Bruce Perens.
Here in Westchester, NY one of our local utilites tried a system in Briarcliff Manor, NY. It totally wiped out any HF reception within 3 tenths of a mile. Your normal background static was replaced by a 30/+9 digital hash. (For you non radio folks, and wi-fi does NOT count, that means the meter is pinned and you can't hear sh#&.) A broad rollout of BPL would mean that for the vast majority of radio amateurs, model railroading would be a better idea-sell you equipment to the illegal CB ops. The systems cannot coexist. I'd be very afraid of BPL when the sunspot numbers are high, as you'd then get interference from BPL somewhere in the world-making all of HF useless. While HF is not where your magik cell phone or Blackberry live, and it is not currently in style, does not mean that it is the toxic waste dump of the RF spectrum. Wi-Max, if the intere$ted partie$ involved could ever get their act together, would be a much better idea. BPL also wipes out CB, which is meaningless unless you are a trucker...or use anything trucks deliver.
You don't even know what is being talked about. "Homeplug" style LAN around your home via powerline. Unequivocally NOT Broadband over Power Line, internet access.
Funny, for those of us who are old, ham radio was the entry point into technology. Are you aware that there was a world before computers ? Indeed, my first real job had a realtime voice recognition system which could convert to text with few errors. You went to lunch and an hour later, when you returned (no calls during lunch..no cell phones) your letter was typed and ready for signature. We called it a secretary who could take shorthand. In this era, technology was made up of discrete components, instead of "all in one chips". Some of us wondered what those components did. We learned that they all had a job and you could easily figure it out. Better yet, people often tossed items full of these components away. We called those "dead TV's" and they were full of FREE components, which re-jiggered, would allow you to talk to Europe with a wire in the backyard. Back when the per minute cost of an international phone call was more than the hourly wage, this was big stuff. OK, today hams use four or five digital modes on HF, using little power and less bandwidth. Ham radios are smaller than a deck of cards. A 12 volt power source and small HF rig will fit in a small tool box, and can work the world on a 135 foot bit of wire. As much as I love technology, I was there on 9-11 and the entire cell net in lower manhattan just crashed. Period. The internet is tissue paper-and the current web of communications is not very hard or resilient. The old guy cranking 1500 watts in the basement with tubes is an old stereotype, and except for a few guys "keeping the AM flame alive" on 3885 mhz, gone. The knowledge you obtain hamming does translate to computers-take it apart, try to make it work, modify it. I wonder if the TFA author can discuss frequency hopping spread spectrum digital communicators....er, cell phones.
If there's any question about HAM operators on the Internet, just check any of the wikipedia articles on radios. You'll easily find lots of (well cited from multiple sources per sentence) stories about how HAM operators invented modern electronics and have saved the world multiple times from disaster. In fact, you'll wonder how any country could get along without them!
Like it or not, the "asshole with the fugly antenna" had it right.
If you look in the manual that came with your TV, you will see a little bit of small print talking about "FCC part 15 regulations". These essentially say that your TV cannot unintentionally radiate a signal that will disrupt any licensed radio service, and, more importantly, that your TV viewing IS NOT PROTECTED against interference by licensed radio services, as long as said stations are operating within their legal requirements (power output, spectral purity, etc.).
In short, you don't have a license to watch TV, but the ham DOES have a license to transmit up to 1500W of RF on various frequencies, whether it screws up your TV or not. If you don't like this, you are free to buy a better quality TV receiver, that incorporates all those "frivolous" features like proper shielding and filtering, that usually get "value engineered" out in order to sell the set for fewer bucks at WalMart.
A good summary of FCC Part 15 available here:
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/part15.html
BTW, you could be subject to FEDERAL charges for damaging a federally licensed radio transmitting station, , if your "asshole" neighbor wanted to press things. Generally, hams are more than willing to work with their neighbors to resolve interference issues (even if not legally required to), but when said complaints become abusive or threatening, we are fully within our rights to tell you to take your cheap Chinese TV set and stick it where the sun don't shine. And the FCC will back us up, every time.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
For a wire to not be an efficient RF radiator, typically it has to be 1/4 wavelength or longer. For the freqencies we're talking about (up to 30MHz), 1/4 wavelength can be as short as 2.5 meters (since 28MHz is around 10 meters).
14 MHz is only 20 meters, so a piece of wire 5 meters long (or even a combination of wires that are segmented together through a panel) can become a radiator (aka transmitting antenna).
You can see where this is going. It's hard to get the frequency low enough where the typical wire layout in even a small home won't tend to transmit RF energy. The lower the frequency, the smaller the frequency spread. You can't transmit as much data in 2-10MHz (8 MHz of total RF spread) as you can in 2-30MHz (28 MHz of spread), and so the throughput rate of the device would be so small that it would no longer be a viable product.
They're caught between physics and the market.
It is appalling to see the dishonest arguments used by the proponents of BPL.
Sure Hams would be affected, but what about the hundreds of other essential services which cram into the H.F. bands?
Everything from Military, to Ambulance, Fire, Police, Aircraft, Marine, etc. rely on H.F. for reliable remote communications.
Ham Radio is an easy target ("just a bunch of nerds, who needs them?"), but whenever the spin is limited to Ham Radio, you know you are listening to a bunch of lying scumbags.
As a professional Communications Engineer, I can tell you that we must kill BPL!
There are other services in the HF band between 1.8 MHz and 50 MHz than just Ham operators and shortwave radio stations.
The spectrum is also used for aviation, particularly when commercial aircraft are over the ocean and out of line-of-sight to a shore station. Most ships at sea use HF radio for communications from ship to ship and for ship to shore communications. The military still uses HF communications for a great many systems, including the broadcast of EAM (emergency action messages).
Someone will say "so what, they are way up in the air or in the middle of the ocean" but they fail to realize that the shore based stations are subject to interference while trying to receive signals from aircraft and ships.
There are still radio navigation systems that operate in the HF bands, weather bouys in the ocean sending back data by HF and many other overlooked systems of lesser renown.
Having spent a significant amount of my professional life hunting down interference sources to communications systems I can say it is NOT a good idea to put a thousand low powerline network extenders across a city. There WILL be harmonic interference, intermodulation and an overall decrease in performance. Look at how badly screwed up the 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and ZigBee are? The 2.4 and 5.8 GHz devices at least have the decency of being line-of-sight and range is limited by buildings. As soon as you attach something to the wiring system of your home you create something that is impossible to manage (resolving interference issues).
Give this one to the Hams and to those of us who still own and use shortwave radios.
Tisha Hayes
Truth. Not only that but there are people still coming into this. I'm working towards my amateur here in Canada, and I'll be glad to get it. For those of us who live in the middle of no where, this stuff is our only lifeline when everything else fails(see ice storms, blizzards, and other natural disasters like floods).
Om, nomnomnom...
Ham's are pretty much self policing. The people that you get the most problem from are CB operators who have poorly tuned boosters.
I totally agree 1000%. I recall one person who lived across the street from me had a CB in his house. We could always tell when he talked on the radio because our toaster would start talking. We never had problems with hams, who also lived near us, though.
Back then I wanted to get my license but I had trouble with Morse Code.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
By law, the max you have to pay for the test to get a license is about $10, but it's supposed to be limited to cost of materials for the VEs, so it should be far less than that under normal circumstances.
Beyond that, you can get on HF with a radio you designed yourself to fit in a sardine tin, and work the world using morse code. As long as it doesn't give off out-of-band emissions, you can build it out of things you find after gently applying a hammer to a cheap drugstore radio.
You can also get plans or pre-built radios for a range of prices from $5 to $5k (and up, I suppose, but you're going to be hard pressed to get much additional value for the dollars over $5k.)
With a UHF handie and a hand-held yagi (total cost new well under $1k), you can talk to people using satellite repeaters. Add in a modem and you can download and share files (which might be images the satellite itself recorded).
For such a low price, and no real requirement of understanding (beyond knowing just enough to avoid violating regulations put in place for safety and interference reasons), I hardly think amateur radio can be considered an elitist hobby. The whole point is to chit chat with new and interesting people from as many places near and far as possible.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
My motto is: "Ham radio: No infrastructure required."
73 de w7com
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I am sorry to hear that in your city they were not as interested in learning about the technologies in so much as buying it.
I am 21, so I am much younger than you, I got into HAM radio because of a project (http://nearspace.0x58.com) I did at school, having a license helped communicate between the teams while on the ground looking for the device, and helped us keep track of the APRS as it was being sent from the balloon.
HAM radio has been really interesting, I have met really great people at various different companies, and recently a hacker space (http://heatsynclabs.org/) has been starting up in Phoenix and there were quite a few HAM radio people there! You just need to find the group that is still willing to learn and find new innovative projects to work on.
cat
OR:
As a ham radio operator (17 years), an ARRL Emergency Coordinator (8 years) and a liason to State and County emergency management departments for 12 years, you will be glad we're here when the rest is down
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)