In article , Mike Coslo
writes:

Seems to me that the first thing you'd have to do is *prove* that the BPL
is
causing you "harmful interference". Then you'd have to let the BPL
providers do
whatever they can to reduce or eliminate it - and FCC expects you to show
"good
faith" and cooperate with them. And even if the interference is not
eliminated,
FCC may or may not force the BPL folks to do anything about it besides
trying
to solve the problem.

And so what then happens when in the normal course of your station
operation, you interfere with your neighbor kid's porn downloads? Same
rules apply?

Who knows?

As I understand it, the old concepts worked like this:

One of the prime directives of the FCC was to protect the various radio
services from interference. This meant both interference between different
radio services, and interference from other electrical devices. Licensed radio
servics *always* had priority over nonradio electrical devices.

For example, if you had a business that used an RF-based heatsealing machine,
and the machine radiated RF that interfered with someone's radio operations,
you'd be required to shield it so no harmful interference resulted, or shut
down.

In almost all cases, methods of interference abatement have been developed. The
RF-based heatsealing machines were shielded to the point that they didn't
radiate enough to interfere, and their frequencies of operation chosen to avoid
common problems if some RF did leak out.

These rules usually worked OK for point sources of RF in industrial
environments. But BPL is neither a point source, nor is it usually meant for
industrial environments.

What's different about how FCC has addressed BPL is that the potential for
interference is not only obvious, it's been demonstrated - and remediation
techniques are very limited, because the power lines make good antennas by
their very nature! Yet FCC allows BPL to exist, probably because it's more a
political decision than an engineering one.

73 de Jim, N2EY