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True story some amateur radio hams managed to nearly torch our shops substation relay with radios. Basically our main transformer switchgear was opening and cl

True story some amateur radio hams managed to nearly torch our shops substation relay with radios. Basically our main transformer switchgear was opening and closing on its own every few minutes. We run a diesel truck repair company and it was killing everything from the front office to the air compressors and anything in between. The electric company told us there's an ultra low frequency "DX" the hams sometimes get into that their own power lines use to communicate with substations. Pretty silly. We lost the air conditioner and the boombox that year.

Johnythree 3y ago
This is spin at best. There have been various systems which attempt to reuse existing frequencies by feeding them over un-shielded power lines. And as experts have warned so many times, it will always end up in tears. If you put radio energy on un-shielded lines, the signals will leak out, causing interference to licensed services. Or will leak in, causing interference from licensed services. And because of the risk of outgoing interference, the signal levels must be kept low, which means that any interference leaking inwards will be much worse. The only possible remediation is to use good error correction so that the effect is minimised. But of course that slows down the communication rate, so the power authorities don't bother. And of course this interference can be caused by a large number of industrial electronics, eg motor speed controllers, welders, and so many others. The point however, is that even if the fault was caused by a flaky VLF control system, then it is very unlikely that it was caused by the relatively low power transmission from an Amateur Radio setup. To try and blame Radio Amateurs when they are legally operating on a licensed Ham band, using very low power levels is ludicrous. And to rabbit on about "ultra low frequency DX" only further demonstrates that the power authorities don't have a clue. It's not ULF and whether or not it is DX is irrelevant. If the power authorities were concerned about interference, they would not have relied on a notoriously unreliable system, or would have run an Optical Fiber along with their Earth/Neutral cables.
LastWeekendWas 3y ago
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Johnythree 3y ago

This is spin at best. There have been various systems which attempt to reuse existing frequencies by feeding them over un-shielded power lines. And as experts have warned so many times, it will always end up in tears. If you put radio energy on un-shielded lines, the signals will leak out, causing interference to licensed services. Or will leak in, causing interference from licensed services. And because of the risk of outgoing interference, the signal levels must be kept low, which means that any interference leaking inwards will be much worse. The only possible remediation is to use good error correction so that the effect is minimised. But of course that slows down the communication rate, so the power authorities don't bother. And of course this interference can be caused by a large number of industrial electronics, eg motor speed controllers, welders, and so many others. The point however, is that even if the fault was caused by a flaky VLF control system, then it is very unlikely that it was caused by the relatively low power transmission from an Amateur Radio setup. To try and blame Radio Amateurs when they are legally operating on a licensed Ham band, using very low power levels is ludicrous. And to rabbit on about "ultra low frequency DX" only further demonstrates that the power authorities don't have a clue. It's not ULF and whether or not it is DX is irrelevant. If the power authorities were concerned about interference, they would not have relied on a notoriously unreliable system, or would have run an Optical Fiber along with their Earth/Neutral cables.

LastWeekendWas 3y ago

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