[CQ-Contest] WSJ Article text, March 23, 2004

[Jim Monahan]

This is the article text referred to by K5KG

Jim, K1PX

K1PX at msn.com<mailto:K1PX at msn.com>


By KEN BROWN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 23, 2004; Page A1

Rick Lindquist drove down a street in a New York City suburb, ignoring
the 
snow swirling around his car and twirling the dial on the ham radio
mounted 
to the side of his dashboard. The radio picked up an operator in
Minnesota 
discussing antennas, the Salvation Army's daily emergency network check
and 
then the time, as broadcast from Colorado by the National Institute of 
Standards and Technology.

As the car turned onto North State Road in the village of Briarcliff
Manor 
in Westchester County, the voices faded, replaced with whirs and wahs --

what could have been sound effects from a 1950s science-fiction movie.
The 
source, according to Mr. Lindquist, was right outside the window: the
power 
lines running alongside the road.

Owned by Consolidated Edison, the lines transmit not just electricity
but 
data, much like phone and cable-TV wires. The utility is testing a
system 
for reading meters, probing for outages and potentially offering
high-speed 
Internet access to its customers via their electrical outlets. The 
interference from the power lines "ranges from very annoying to 
that's-all-I-can-hear," contends Mr. Lindquist, 58 years old, who often 
taps out Morse-code messages as he drives.

In a clash between the dots and dashes of the telegraph and the bits and

bytes of the Web, the nation's vocal but shrinking population of
ham-radio 
operators, or "hams" as they call themselves, are stirring up a war with

the utility industry over new power-line communications. Hams have
flooded 
the Federal Communications Commission with about 2,500 letters and
e-mails 
opposing power-line trials. In a letter to the FCC, the American Radio 
Relay League, a ham-radio group with 160,000 members, called power-line 
communications "a Pandora's box of unprecedented proportions."

The league has raised more than $300,000 from nearly 5,600 donors since 
last summer, to pay for testing, lobbying and publicity to spread the
word 
about the perceived threat. A half-dozen hams even confronted FCC
Chairman 
Michael Powell, a big advocate of the power-line technology, when he 
visited a test site near Raleigh, N.C., earlier this month.

The problem, most ham operators contend, is that power lines weren't
built 
to carry anything other than electricity. Telephone and cable-TV lines
are 
either shielded with a second set of wires or twisted together to
prevent 
their signals from interfering with other transmissions. But signals
sent 
over electrical wires tend to spill out, the hams contend.

The FCC and the utilities say new technologies have eliminated the 
interference and accuse the hams of exploiting the issue for their own 
gains. "We haven't seen the sun darken and everything electrical turn to

white noise and haze during a deployment," says Matt Oja, an executive
at 
Progress Energy, whose test Mr. Powell visited. "This is a fairly vocal 
group that has been whipped into a frenzy by their organization."

The controversy comes at a sensitive time for the hams. Not too many 
decades ago, ham-radio operators were on the cutting edge of
communications 
technology. They chatted with people in far-flung places at a time when 
long-distance calling was still a luxury. They spread word of disasters 
that otherwise might have taken days to reach the public. In the age of 
e-mail, wireless Internet access and cellphones that double as 
walkie-talkies, many operators worry that their hobby will fade away.

To become a fully licensed ham operator, people still need to learn
Morse 
code, though that requirement likely will be dropped soon after more
than a 
decade of debate. Aging hams, who built crystal radio sets as kids or
were 
radio operators during World War II, are dying. Fewer youngsters are 
replacing them. Armed with powerful computers, today's young tinkerers
grow 
up to be tech geeks, playing videogames and writing software.

The American Radio Relay League has seen its membership shrink to
today's 
160,000 from a peak of 175,000 in 1995, and the average member is in his

mid-50s. The group estimates that there are about 250,000 active
ham-radio 
enthusiasts.

Hams always have been a quirky bunch. They haunt a series of short-wave 
radio frequencies set aside for them by the federal government in the 
1930s. Other slices of the spectrum are reserved for AM and FM radio, 
broadcast television, cellphones, and police and fire departments, among

other uses.

Hams take great pride in radioing around the world. One favorite game: 
trying to contact someone in each of the 3,000-plus counties in the U.S.

Mr. Lindquist is so enthusiastic about ham radio that he vacations in
spots 
such as Whitehorse, the capital of Canada's Yukon Territory, so other
hams 
can claim they made contact with that city.

Ed Thomas, the FCC's chief engineer, says the commission has spent a
year 
listening to the hams' concerns about power lines and is getting 
frustrated. "Why is this thing a major calamity?" he says. "And
honestly, 
I'd love the answer to that."

Companies such as Con Ed and Progress note that current FCC regulations 
call for systems to be shut down if they interfere with hams. The radio 
operators agree the rules are clear, but they fear they will be
rescinded 
or not enforced.

Con Ed says its system in Briarcliff Manor doesn't interfere with the
hams 
and maintains that, in two years of testing, it hasn't received one 
complaint. But the American Radio Relay League says it did mention this 
system in its letters to the FCC, and it has been complaining about it
on 
its Web site.

The hams have been quick to act wherever systems are being rolled out.
Just 
days after Penn Yan, a town of 5,200 that sits amid New York's Finger 
Lakes, approved a plan to test power-line Internet access, "the
firestorm 
started with the ham-radio operators -- letters, e-mails, telephone
calls 
saying, 'You can't do this,' " recalls Mayor Doug Marchionda Jr.

Hoping to keep everyone happy, he approached David Simmons, a local ham
and 
owner of an electronics store that sells radio gear. They surveyed the
town 
before the trial began to get base readings of interference. They even 
pinpointed a spot that had bothered police and firefighters for years, 
tracing it to refrigerators at a local supermarket.

With the refrigerators fixed and the power-line system in place over
nine 
blocks of Penn Yan, Mr. Simmons is satisfied that there is no
interference 
and now favors the new technology. "This thing has caught quite a buzz,"
he 
says. "It's just so much negativity out there."

Tom Gius, a ham-radio operator in Alpine, Texas, sees the power lines as
a 
threat to the public services that hams provide. When hailstorms sweep 
through each spring, Mr. Gius heads to the local radio station, while
other 
hams fan out to the north, south, east and west. They communicate by
radio, 
and Mr. Gius passes information to the radio station. "We won't be able
to 
understand each other, it'll be so noisy," frets Mr. Gius, a 60-year-old

retired broadcaster.

Write to Ken Brown at <mailto:ken.brown at wsj.com>ken.brown at wsj.com<mailto:ken.brown at wsj.com>ken.brown at wsj.com>