Subject: [NEXTEL-1] In This Power Play, High-Wire Act Riles Ham-Radio Fans New Use for Lines Sparks Tension With Operators; 'Firestorm' in Penn Yan

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 06:25:24 -0500

www.WSJ.com

In This Power Play, High-Wire Act Riles Ham-Radio Fans New Use for Lines
Sparks Tension With Operators; 'Firestorm' in Penn Yan

By KEN BROWN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 23, 2004; Page A1

Rick Lindquist drove down a street in a New York
City suburb, ignoring the snow swirling around his
car and twirling the dial on the ham radio mounted to
the side of his dashboard. The radio picked up an
operator in Minnesota discussing antennas, the
Salvation Army's daily emergency network check
and then the time, as broadcast from Colorado by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As the car turned onto North State Road in the
village of Briarcliff Manor in Westchester County,
the voices faded, replaced with whirs and wahs --
what could have been sound effects from a 1950s
science-fiction movie. The source, according to Mr.
Lindquist, was right outside the window: the power
lines running alongside the road.

Owned by Consolidated Edison, the lines transmit
not just electricity but data, much like phone and
cable-TV wires. The utility is testing a system for
reading meters, probing for outages and potentially
offering high-speed Internet access to its customers
via their electrical outlets. The interference from the
power lines "ranges from very annoying to
that's-all-I-can-hear," contends Mr. Lindquist, 58
years old, who often taps out Morse-code messages
as he drives.

In a clash between the dots and dashes of the
telegraph and the bits and bytes of the Web, the
nation's vocal but shrinking population of ham-radio
operators, or "hams" as they call themselves, are
stirring up a war with the utility industry over new
power-line communications. Hams have flooded the
Federal Communications Commission with about
2,500 letters and e-mails opposing power-line trials.
In a letter to the FCC, the American Radio Relay
League, a ham-radio group with 160,000 members,
called power-line communications "a Pandora's box of unprecedented
proportions."

The league has raised more than $300,000 from nearly 5,600 donors since
last summer, to pay for testing, lobbying and publicity to spread the
word about the perceived threat. A half-dozen hams even confronted FCC
Chairman Michael Powell, a big advocate of the power-line technology,
when he visited a test site near Raleigh, N.C., earlier this month.

The problem, most ham operators contend, is that power lines weren't
built to carry anything other than electricity. Telephone and cable-TV
lines are either shielded with a second set of wires or twisted together
to prevent their signals from interfering with other transmissions. But
signals sent over electrical wires tend to spill out, the hams contend.

The FCC and the utilities say new technologies have eliminated the
interference and accuse the hams of exploiting the issue for their own
gains. "We haven't seen the sun darken and everything electrical turn to
white noise and haze during a deployment," says Matt Oja, an executive
at Progress Energy, whose test Mr. Powell visited. "This is a fairly
vocal group that has been whipped into a frenzy by their organization."

The controversy comes at a sensitive time for the hams. Not too many
decades ago, ham-radio operators were on the cutting edge of
communications technology. They chatted with people in far-flung places
at a time when long-distance calling was still a luxury. They spread
word of disasters that otherwise might have taken days to reach the
public. In the age of e-mail, wireless Internet access and cellphones
that double as walkie-talkies, many operators worry that their hobby
will fade away.

To become a fully licensed ham operator, people still need to learn
Morse code, though that requirement likely will be dropped soon after
more than a decade of debate. Aging hams, who built crystal radio sets
as kids or were radio operators during World War II, are dying. Fewer
youngsters are replacing them.  Armed with powerful computers, today's
young tinkerers grow up to be tech geeks, playing videogames and writing
software.

The American Radio Relay League has seen its membership shrink to
today's 160,000 from a peak of 175,000 in 1995, and the average member
is in his mid-50s. The group estimates that there are about 250,000
active ham-radio enthusiasts.
Hams always have been a quirky bunch. They haunt a series of short-wave
radio frequencies set aside for them by the federal government in the
1930s. Other slices of the spectrum are reserved for AM and FM radio,
broadcast television, cellphones, and police and fire departments, among
other uses.

Hams take great pride in radioing around the world. One favorite game:
trying to contact someone in each of the 3,000-plus counties in the U.S.
Mr. Lindquist is so enthusiastic about ham radio that he vacations in
spots such as Whitehorse, the capital of Canada's Yukon Territory, so
other hams can claim they made contact with that city.

Ed Thomas, the FCC's chief engineer, says the commission has spent a
year listening to the hams' concerns about power lines and is getting
frustrated. "Why is this thing a major calamity?" he says. "And
honestly, I'd love the answer to that."
Companies such as Con Ed and Progress note that current FCC regulations
call for systems to be shut down if they interfere with hams. The radio
operators agree the rules are clear, but they fear they will be
rescinded or not enforced.

Con Ed says its system in Briarcliff Manor doesn't interfere with the
hams and maintains that, in two years of testing, it hasn't received one
complaint. But the American Radio Relay League says it did mention this
system in its letters to the FCC, and it has been complaining about it
on its Web site.

The hams have been quick to act wherever systems are being rolled out.
Just days after Penn Yan, a town of 5,200 that sits amid New York's
Finger Lakes, approved a plan to test power-line Internet access, "the
firestorm started with the ham-radio operators -- letters, e-mails,
telephone calls saying, 'You can't do this,' " recalls Mayor Doug
Marchionda Jr.

Hoping to keep everyone happy, he approached David Simmons, a local ham
and owner of an electronics store that sells radio gear. They surveyed
the town before the trial began to get base readings of interference.
They even pinpointed a spot that had bothered police and firefighters
for years, tracing it to refrigerators at a local supermarket.

With the refrigerators fixed and the power-line system in place over
nine blocks of Penn Yan, Mr.  Simmons is satisfied that there is no
interference and now favors the new technology. "This thing has caught
quite a buzz," he says. "It's just so much negativity out there."

Tom Gius, a ham-radio operator in Alpine, Texas, sees the power lines as
a threat to the public services that hams provide. When hailstorms sweep
through each spring, Mr. Gius heads to the local radio station, while
other hams fan out to the north, south, east and west. They communicate
by radio, and Mr.  Gius passes information to the radio station. "We
won't be able to understand each other, it'll be so noisy," frets Mr.
Gius, a 60-year-old retired broadcaster.

Write to Ken Brown at [email-masked]

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