On Mar 4, 2:44 am, (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) wrote:
What you really need to do is to convince your local power company to
do what Israel Electric did. A long time ago they figured that BPL was
not worth it, but their right of way was. So they ran a fiber optic network
along with their power lines and use it to monitor and control their
distribituion equipment.

If they ever can get a license to sell Internet access, then they can just use
the fiber optics.

As for the local telephone company just upgrading from dial service, isn't
there a fairly large tax in the U.S. to support providing telephone
service to rural customers? Where did that money go?
Alltel used the money to put up the cellular transponders along US 65
& in Harrison, its largest shopping zone.

Compare the population density of Israel with the Ozarks. Lotsa folks
beside me, still have property beyond the grid. That's much of why
folks move out here; they want to get waaaaay back. There are lotsa
places you can go outside at nite, and if you turn out the lites, its
totally pitch black because there are no other lights in any
direction. Lotsa folks own real estate entirely surrounded by
National forest, family farms that were never bought up.

There are simialar regions in the Rockies. I even read about a 'net'
that used packet radio spread across hundreds of miles of mountains.
Canada, Siberia, Australia, and other regions are also way too thinly
populated to afford anyone running cable.

we all know what lightning sounds like. The Titanic had a similar
"spark transmitter", Not that different from the spark coil in a gas
engine. I can see designing a circuit with a resonant tank to produce
a pulse with a wavelength matching a tuned Yagi. No carrier wave. No
frequency or amplitude modulation. And without being hooked up to a
tuned yagi pointed in the correct direction, none of the AM/FM/TV
tuners would pick it up. No IF either. A continuous train of pulses
would look like a carrier wave, but that aint what *data* is.

If, for instance a "1" is a postive pulse, but a "0" negative, and the
sequence of 0100011101010100110.... keeps changing, as it would with
data, then tuners would ignore it. There's no sin wave. Zeners have
been used in surge suppressors rated in nsec and I've seen sin wave
illustrations of the circuitry in psec intervals. Seems like something
mite be done.

Anyone know the data rate on the IR inputs on mthbds? Seems like the
response time on IR diodes is pretty quick too... Feeding the mthbd
with whatever came in an IR detector would islolate it from the
antenna in case there really was a nearby lightning strike.