National society acts over Smart Meter interference

Fallacious Straw Man argument.

The issue isn’t that the hams had interference. That was merely the way in which the utility’s illegal HF transmissions came to the attention of the regulator.

This issue is that those transmissions are illegal and wouldn’t have been approved even if the utility had properly applied to make them, according to what we’ve read in this thread.

 

*American* smart meters use 900 MHz. These likely use PLC.

 

Are you?

Take a chill pill

 

If you are the hobbyist, its a big deal. Especially because you are licensed and allocated accordingly. Why should we abide by rules when no one else has to? Are you suggesting the St Kitts hams should just 'deal with it'?

Yeah there is a backstory. But are you pro-RFI because there aren't hundreds of thousands of St Kitys hams? Shame on you.

 

Hey keyboard commando... what is YOUR solution, so that we may berate it like you do.

Choose another hobby.

 

Pro rfi?

Not hardly.

But I realize this is a hobby, with almost non-existent entry requirments.

And it mostly exists to sell a quite insignificant fraction of the worlds electronics output.

Thinking millions of dollars will be spent so a couple guys can talk on a ham radio is silly.

Rege

 

Millions? I GUESS YOU CAN NOT READ:

"No, they would just go back to the Meter reader truck driving down the streets to read the Smart Meters, once a month as they did for the past 10 YEARS, prior to installing the ILLEGAL UNAUTHORISED BPL Concentrators." That INTERFERE with COMMERCIAL, MARITIME, and every other LEGAL AUTHORISED to use 2- 12MHZ in ADDITION to lowly Amateur Radio.

AGAIN:
"No, they would just go back to the Meter reader truck driving down the streets to read the Smart Meters, once a month as they did for the past 10 YEARS, prior to installing the ILLEGAL UNAUTHORISED BPL Concentrators." That INTERFERE with COMMERCIAL, MARITIME, and every other LEGAL AUTHORISED to use 2- 12MHZ in ADDITION to lowly Amateur Radio.

JUST TO BE SURE YOU GOT IT:
"No, they would just go back to the Meter reader truck driving down the streets to read the Smart Meters, once a month as they did for the past 10 YEARS, prior to installing the ILLEGAL UNAUTHORISED BPL Concentrators." That INTERFERE with COMMERCIAL, MARITIME, and every other LEGAL AUTHORISED to use 2- 12MHZ in ADDITION to lowly Amateur Radio.

 

As St Kitts and Nevis are former British dependencies, it is likely that their spectrum regulations are patterned after the UK, which gives "non-safety services" a quite weak protection from "unintentional radiators", to which group BPL and related interfererers belong.

The ITU only regulates "intentional radiators", but has a general provision in the Radio Regulations that prohibit interference from "electrical apparatus". Only in very special circumstances has this prohibition been invoked on the national scale.

Looking into which other spectrum users that may have been interfered with in the 2-12 MHz range, according to the IMO GMDSS Master Plan there are no ground based MF or HF installations for the GMDSS neither in sea areas IV nor V near the islands.

The Air Traffic Control functions in oceanic part of the PIARCO FIR to which the St Kitts TMA belong, are being handled by New York or San Juan ARINC HF facilities.

This leaves the tropical broadcast band, and any use of MF or HF by the 300 strong police force on the island. Since no reports of interference appear to have been filed except by radio amateurs, it appears that no commercial, and especially no safety related users have been affected.

Depending of the stance taken by the local regulator, it remains to be seen which status amateur radio will have in the real world. In other countries which use the current interpretation according to British practice of the ITU regulations, amateur radio has the lowest of priorities.

I believe, and it is most probably a view shared with the regulator, that this is just another case of amateur radio hobbyists overstating their importance.

73/
Karl-Arne
SM0AOM

 

St Kitts has been Independent Federation since 1983, and follows the Region 2 Band plan. It is my understanding that the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunication Authority (ECTEL), HQ in St Lucia, W.I. of which St Kitts is a member country, is preparing to take action against SKELEC on behalf of the St. Kitts NTRC. I would guess if for no other reason but to protect their "Authorization" authority. John V47JA/W5JON

 

Fine by me. The party with the most money, and/or guns wins every time.That is exactly what is going to happen here.

Smart meters has nothing to do with the interference, they use cellular like all utilities do. They just use HF for transport which no other utility would do in the USA

 

I agree with your first part, though maybe not as you intended - the government will win, the utility will lose.

As for the smart meters, it seems you stand on being correct regarding a small technicality of the story while being wrong about almost all of it. Had the story said “smart meter system” instead of “smart meters”, you would be 100% wrong.

 

The choice of BPL in the HF range by the utility was a quite stupid decision, not only from the
interference point-of-view. BPL has not lived up to the expectations in previous deployments.

Something all HF users have to really watch out for will be the massive deployment of small-scale solar power plants.

In the Nordic countries individual solar power arrays are becoming subsidised, and with rising energy prices, the penetration will become quite prevalent in the coming years.

Current EMC norms do not limit radiation in the HF range from complete installations, which causes some worry among military spectrum users.

In some cases, they have vetoed installations nearby military comm centres due to interference risks, but up to now the decisions have been overturned by higher courts.

HF users have a very "uphill battle" to fight, as energy saving and solar power is considered a matter of great political importance.

Anyone, especially hobbyist radio users, publicly going against these interests are going to have a difficult time.

73/
Karl-Arne
SM0AOM

 

But from this thread, the utility is illegally operating since it didn’t apply for an HF BPL license and it wouldn’t have been granted anyway. It’s not simply a case of an authorized service interfering with amateurs.

 

Don’t the EU EMC directives apply to equipment in the solar plants? Here the equivalent regulations do, as far as I know.

 

The whole point with BPL and related techniques is that they are not transmitters in the sense of the Radio Regulations and national laws derived from these.

No regulator I know of requires a licence to operate any carrier-current or BPL-related system.
If they did, the BPL would have been a transmitter licensed to operate in a certain frequency range.

What may be have been violated are national EMC regulations, as the equipment is an "unintentional radiator". I have had reason to investigate in some detail the legal background to EMC regulations for telecommunications equipment, which are not transmitters by design.

It appears that only spectrum users that have been specifically mentioned in the national rules enjoy protection from interference from such sources, and these are in order of importance:

• Public safety and traffic safety communications (land, air and sea)
• National TV and radio broadcasts
• Military communications
• Licence fee paying users of e.g. land mobile spectrum

The mutual order may vary between jurisdictions.

Others have no or very little protection.
A very good example is Germany.

Up to about 2010, the German spectrum regulator, the BNetzA,
actively investigated interference complaints to international HF broadcasting, with the
justification that being able to receive international broadcasts was part of the "freedom of information" policy.

With the substantial decline in the numbers of HF broadcasters, the agency decided that nobody any longer needs HF to get information from abroad, and stopped investigations. This saved a lot of manpower and other resources, as resolving local HF interference can be very time-consuming.
The BNetzA is however still interested of protecting licensed HF spectrum from "intruders", and is among the last in Europe to which complaints can be directed and getting at least some response.

To my knowledge, the situation has become quite similar in the rest of Europe, it has been reported at the UKQRM.org website that the British regulator Ofcom does not act very much on RFI complaints coming from "non-safety" or "non-paying" users.

The current directive and EMC norms do not apply to the whole installation, only to components.

Some legalese exists about general "protection requirements", but their actual force has not been determined in the courts.

There is currently work going on in this direction in the CISPR and the
EU commission, which is quite slow and also seriously contested by the manufacturers.


73/
Karl-Arne
SM0AOM