The Electromagnetic Compatibility Industry Association (EMCIA) is a British trade group comprising “companies involved in supplying, designing, testing and manufacturing EMC products.” The EMCIA has been a big critic of BPL in the U.K.
They recently announced a contest to identify the interference range of Power Line Telecommunications – otherwise known as PLC or BPL. These devices aren’t BPL devices as we know them here in the U.S., but rather home networking devices that use a home’s power wiring to network computer devices.
The objectives of the contest are:
- To conduct EMC testing of Power-Line Adaptors in their installed configuration at a statistically-significant number of sites so as to help determine interference probability as defined in CISPR16-4-1; 2003.
- To provide EMC test data from a single emission source that is relevant both to such a single source and by extrapolation to the cumulative effect of many such sources, so as to facilitate the analysis and presentation of information about the interference probability of installations of PLT equipment. (PLT is elsewhere known as PLC or BPL).
The contest rules also includes this statement: “For the convenient measurement of interference emission without the use of laboratory-grade equipment these objectives are to be met by exploration of the distance of detection of the interference emissions from a single installation of Power Line Adaptors (PLAs).”
This is a strictly UK contest. The rules say that the devices under test must be available to the UK consumer, and they must be installed in a UK residence. That being the case, I hope some of our UK brethren accept the challenge and do a bang-up job on it.
Neil L Robertson says
With reference to the above competition – for some background on (perhaps?) why this
contest has come about see http://www.rsgb.org/news/statements.php?id=0035 on the
RSGB web-site. My club (and individuals) have contributed to the RSGB Spectrun Defence
Fund which aims to stop non-compliant devices coming to the market.