"Roger" wrote in message
...



BPL itself it probably not doomed at not least for the utilities. They
see it as a way to not only do automated meter reading, but load
leveling/demand control as well. Of course those things can be
handled nicely by the low frequency stuff they use now, but remote
visual monitoring will require much more bandwidth. Many see it as a
way of getting the consumer to pay for the costs of more advanced
monitoring.

Which consumers will pay the costs? The power consumers or the presumed
broadband internet over powerline consumers?

Now that I think of it, they could try to sell a BPL security camera for
every utility pole, and ask the police departments to pay for it.



This is old stuff. The only thing new is the chip. It's the home plug
system and what the BPL crowd hope to use and are using at the home
end of their feeds. OTOH there are many home plug systems in current
use that have nothing to do with BPL.

Yeah, you're right. I was going to comment that this Panasonic plan looks a
lot like an upgraded version of the homeplug standard.



However the article is a bit generous when it talks about the
technology probably being used in Europe and the US due to the more
strict regulations in Japan. What he should have said is BPL is under
more strict regulations, it is *BANNED* in Japan.



They are talking about smart appliances where, in this case the
refrigerator would run diagnostics and if any thing such as pressure
is out of spec it'd call home reporting it needed service before
actually failing.

True, but I don't think the average consumer much cares about such
over-hyped geekoid stuff as networked appliances. I'd be far more impressed
with a chip which reduced power consumption by 20% or so. Besides, most
current appliances are already highly reliable. Computerizing appliances in
an attempt to increase reliability might be, at best, a wash.




It does take a modem for the computer that plugs into the socket, but
yes, you could put the thing any where in the house.
Like a dial up moden that can plug into any phone outlett, this modem
could plug into any electrical outlett.


Yes, the home plug system has been in use for some time.

How much RFI does a home plug system make? I have no expirence with
homeplug, but I'm imagining it's on the order of a poorly filtered
switchmode power supply.




The interference, so far, has been confined to next door neighbors.
According to the reports on some forums you had best hope your
neighbor doesn't purchase one of those Ionic Breeze air filters.

I do wonder about ingress though. As with BPL a 5 watt signal from
100 feet will block almost any system completely (with the exception
of the Motorola which uses hard filtering)

I do some DXing which means I run the legal limit on all bands with
directive antennas. Based on the 5 watts at 100 feet I should take
out any BPL up to a bit over a mile on 20, 15, 10, and 6 meters while
40 and 75 would be about a quarter to half mile and 160 would be maybe
a city block. The 75 meter half wave slopers to the NE (Europe) ends
within 50 feet of the local power line. The one to the sough ends
within a 150 feet of the power line. The one to the NW is pretty much
in the clear. The 40 meter antennas run pretty much in the same
directions but I hope to have a 40 - 10 yagi up soon. As I'm also
setting up for digital including RTTY and WSJT, I don't think it'd
take much of a transmission to shut down quite an area. With the
power levels and antenna gain the ERP might even keep the neighborhood
RF quiet.

I'm not sure there's much comfort in that. Radio rights come from
politicians, and politicians respond to public pressure.



BTW, the only reason I ended up on this thread Frank was your post. I
make it a policy to never click on links in a post that do not come
with a complete description such as the original post. I typically
kill file the thread as those are the ones that usually send you off
to some malicious site.

Even if it looks like it might be interesting, I let some one else be
the guinea pig. :-))

Hmmm. Guess I waste time, so you don't have to!


Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

Frank Dresser