KØHB wrote:
Is anyone else embarrassed by the 'public sound and fury' antics of ARRL
in response to the BPL threat? Below is part of some correspondence I
sent to my Division Director. If you feel it's time for more sound
science and less hand-wringing, you should let YOUR Director know.

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Jay,

I understand all the arguments against BPL rollout and I agree with 98%
of them. I also agreee that ARRL ought to mount the strongest possible
technical rebuttal to relaxation of Part 15 rules. To that end the work
of Ed Hare, et.al. is dead on target. I personally authorize you to
double the amount of my dues to support sound science-based work which
generates a technically convincing rebuttal to Michael Powell and his
minions.

But this amateurish "whipping up the troops to write letters to the
White House" and similar tactics are embarrassing. The typical ham (I'm
sorry to report) hasn't the technical accumen to make any sort of
persuasive case against BPL, so their protests take on the whining tone
of "you can't do this to us because we do all this good stuff on HF.".

As someone with a lot of professional contacts in the wireless industry,
I can tell you that our public and regulatory image is on a swift
decline. We are increasing viewed as technically naive kneejerk
obstructionists. For every Ed Hare doing good technical investigation
and writing convincing counter arguments, there are thousands of
clueless emotional emails and letters irresponsibly stoked up by Dave
Sumner editorials. The valuable and responsible work of Ed Hare gets
lost in the "noise and fury".


Hey Hans,

Once upon a time, in my naivety, I thought a good sound technical
rebuttal of BPL would be sufficient to sway the regulators. After all,
it is so technically awful that it *should* be easy to convince an
intelligent person without much difficulty that it is a loser
technology. Certainly other countries around the world have agreed it is
such.

My old opinion can be googled up here. But times have changed.

I think the decision was made a long time ago based on other than
technical reasons, and BPL *will* be rolled out, and I don't think there
is one thing that we can do about it, save for the ballot box.

BPL is going to happen! All money spent fighting it, all letters to
representatives, all comments to the FCC and all the hand wringing is
100 percent useless.

I am pegging my hopes on BPL being the failure that it will inevitably
be. The utilities will run the fibers, start running the BPL portion of
the lines, and after they find out how many of their transformers are
putting out trash that interferes with the digital signal,( check the
FCC actions on arrl.org to see how good the utilities are at replacing
noisy transformers) and after the BPL users figure out that cable is
faster and DSL is more reliable anyhow, BPL will become the 8 track of
the internet.

Then what will happen is that they will step back, take a look, and
figure out that they already have 95 percent of the job finished. The
fiber is almost to the houses! simply run it the rest of the way, and
LIB! decent speed internet connections! If the ill educated consumers at
the other end want to they can go wireless, so they don't even have to
connect their machines to a outlet in the wall.

- Mike KB3EIA -