Gentlemen:
Clearly UPLC took the low road with their press handout. The
question is, "at whom was it aimed?" It may be that in seeking to
discredit amateurs, many of whom are notable professionals, they have
skewered themselves.
I can think of one ham, who happens to be a nobel prize winning physicist
and is retiring from a major university, and who, were he motivated to
comment
publicly, could singlehandedly sway the public debate.
We need to be careful, in our public statements, to remain factual,
centered,
and to tone down the emotion. My personal estimate of cost of service
suggests
that fiber could be pulled in for no more money (and possibly less) than
attempting
to use power wiring. But I'm not an industry insider, so I don't know some
of their
accounting assumptions(figures can't lie, but liars can figure...), so I
doubt that
I could produce a defensible strategic argument on economic grounds. The
chap from
Carnegie Mellon who studied BPL did that, and credibly. But his article
hasn't carried
very far, in the face of lobbying effort. His conclusion was that rural
customers could
not be economically served by BPL, unless there were 5 drops per wireless
access point
crossing the final transformer. NOT a characteristic of heartland america.
IF..and this is an important point...IF you go to the Amperion website, and
read their
discussions, you will find that they're concerned with power industry
reluctance to
adopt PLC/BPL. Why? The early proponents of PLC overstated its
capabilities. I infer
that this is a questionable investment, even for the power companies.
Perhaps THEY
should be the target of our approach?
This is not to single out Amperion, who evidently has worked at trying to
alleviate RFI
in the amateur bands (per Ed Hare, w1rfi). My concern is, if they avoid
the ham bands,
what do they to do other frequencies, and will they affect treaty-based
services like
broadcast, or safety-of-life frequencies like air to ground or marine? I'd
love to know
if they could violate SOLAS, during high sunspot times, for example.
We have added homework to do, folks. Meantime, I suggest keeping your
letters short, sweet,
and on-point. But DO begin a dialog with your representatives. It will go
a long way to
helping shape policy decisions after the upcoming election.
N2EA
jimjarvis@ieee.org
_______________________________________________
RFI mailing list
RFI@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rfi
|