[TowerTalk] BPL article lacks insight

[Jim Lux]

At 12:52 PM 1/8/2004 -0500, K4IA at aol.com wrote:
>The problem with the article is: here we go again . . .
>
>The author acts like Hams (a bunch of weird geeks with a strange hobby who
>screw up your TV set and have ugly antennas on their homes and cars) ) are 
>the
>only ones affected, and, by the way, FEMA is concerned.  I am sending a 
>copy of
>this to the author so he can comment, but I suspect he just doesn't know what
>he doesn't know.
>
>Take a look at a frequency allocation chart like the one here:
>http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.html
>
>We are only a small subset of spectrum users.  Every single hertz is
>occupied.  How come the author doesn't interview or mention the other 
>users?  Even the
>ARRL is a bit guilty of this.  Instead of emphasizing the disaster this is
>for all radio users, they spin the dial in the middle of 20 meters where the
>background conversation could hardly be described as "important" and, to 
>someone
>who is not used to hearing SSB, the conversation is unintelligible anyway.
>Why not spin the dial on top of the BBC, or HF ground-to-air, or navigation
>beacons (who wants to be lost in an airplane?) or maritime mobile, or 
>police, fire
>and rescue, or any of the other users of the HF spectrum?



Well put...



>If this boils down to hams vs. BPL, we lose big.  All discussion of BPL has
>got to be in a much broader context than ham radio.   I can only assume the
>other services are not howling bloody murder because they do not 
>understand what
>is coming.


They ARE howling... the shortwave broadcasters have a comment filed, for 
instance, as has ARINC.  However, in the US media, SW broadcasting doesn't 
get much attention, and as for HF aeronautical....

And, practically speaking, the average US person doesn't care much about 
whether BBC reaches Lesotho, as long as they've got their AOL.

But, to follow on my earlier comments, raising these issues in places where 
investors will see them is probably a productive strategy.  If the 
investors see that it's just not a matter of "notching out" the bands for 
those whining hams or for FEMAs frequencies, but that there's a LOT of 
activity in those bands, with serious dollars behind it to fight the BPL 
technology...  It's one thing to postulate making a regulatory spectrum 
tradeoff dumping amateur radio operators (on the "greatest good for the 
greatest number" approach... BPL is worth more to society than a bunch of 
geeks playing radio) ... we have no real clout.  Entirely another to 
postulate dumping ARINC, with the multibillion dollar airline industry 
behind it.