Technical Topics, August 2003
NASWA Alerts FCC To BPL Danger
For the first time in its long history, NASWA has publicly defended the interests of shortwave broadcast listeners in the USA. On June 30, 2003 NASWA submitted an 18-page filing to the FCC in response to Notice of Inquiry 03-104 concerning Broadband Power Line (BPL) communications. The Journal does not have the room to print the entire submission, but this month I will attempt to summarize many of the points made in that submission. Comments by AMRAD and the NAB also mentioned the impact to shortwave listeners and I have included part of their comments too.
As you probably already know from the Musings in the June NASWA Journal, there are well-funded interests who want to use the commercial power lines as a way to conduct high-speed data communications. Many of the proponents of this technology have chosen to design systems using frequencies that are between 2 and 30 MHz.
The number of shortwave listeners in the USA is hard to estimate accurately since Arbitron does not survey such listeners. The CIA Factbook says there are 575 million radios here. If only one percent of these radios have shortwave capability, that would be almost 6 million shortwave receivers. A reasonable estimate would be that hundreds of thousands of listeners tune in to shortwave broadcasts weekly.
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