Broadband over Power Lines
Introduction
 | An introduction to Broadband over Power Lines (text of an item by Owen Duffy in WIA News 03/03/2005) |
| Are you ready for BPL enablement of your home and neighbourhood? |
Submissions
| Submission to the ACA discussion paper entitled "Management of Interference from Broadband over Power Lines. |
Observations
BPL Interference Evaluation Tool
CENELEC is the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization. CENELEC are developing a standard for "Electromagnetic emissions from access powerline communications networks". Access powerline networks are commonly termed Broadband over Power Lines or BPL.
The proposed CENELEC standard does not automatically apply globally, though countries like Australia draw heavily on international standards such as CENELEC's for their own jurisdiction.
This calculator allows evaluation of the impact of BPL interference under the proposed CENELEC standard given a set of location / application specific parameters.
| BPL interference evaluation tool documentation |
| BPL interference evaluation tool |
Field Strength Measurement
|  FSM software |
| Small Untuned Square Loop for field strength measurement |
| Antenna Factor of short tuned vertical with concentrated loading |
| Expected ambient noise level |
Other standards
The US FCC specifices limits for interference under Part 15.209, although not specfically written for BPL. The radiation limits on HF are effectively just a little lower (~ 6dB) than the proposed CENELEC standard, see Comparison of the proposed CENELEC standard and existing US FCC 15.209 on HF Amateur Bands.
There are indications that the BPL industry regards that the proposed CENELEC standard and the US Part 15 provisions are too restrictive and would like them to set a higher permitted level, and want removal of interference protection for "less significant" radio communications users.
Resources
Ed Hare (W1RFI) has written a flexible RF Field Strength and Receive Signal Level Calculator which you can download. It currently does not have separate documentation, but to savvy users, what is not intuitive is probably covered by pop-ups.
