Are Electric Cars Greater Ham Radio Threat than PLT?

The South African Radio League are suggesting that electric car charging stations could pose a greater threat to amateur radio than Power Line Telecommunication (PLT).

The looming problem was extensively discussed during an IARU EMC committee meeting.  There is currently no consensus amongst various technical bodies such as ETSI, CEPT, CIPR and ITU about the inference limits.

One of the problems the committee identified is that the delegations who attend these meetings are not necessarily people experienced in radio and telecommunications and are more concerned about how fast these electric car batteries can be charged.  This is one of the aspects that will be discussed at the IARU Region 1 meeting with a call to mobilise national societies to start talking with their standard bodies.

The SARL is represented on the TC73 committee of the SABS where EMC and EMI matters are dealt with. The SARL representative, Hans van de Groenendaal, will also raise the issue at Working Group 5 of TC73 due to meet in the next two months.

SARL News - http://www.sarl.org.za/public/_news/read_arch.asp?file=../../bulletins/sarlnews%2020170909.txt

Report VDSL interference NOW

For three years the RSGB EMC Committee has been investigating the problems of interference from VDSL broadband on the HF amateur bands and lobbying for action to reduce the problem.

It has a lot of historical data, but both Ofcom and Openreach contend that 150 reports from 50,000 amateurs are not indicative of a major problem when there are 9.5 million VDSL installations deployed.

RSGB EMC Committee has set up a survey to collect current signal levels at the frequencies of VDSL band transitions, which indicate the presence and strength of interference. It is very simple to do you just tune your receiver (set to AM or SSB 3kHz bandwidth) to each frequency requested note the S meter reading on the survey form. Full instructions are included in the survey.

The EMC Committee plans to present its findings at the RSGB Convention in October and then use them to persuade Openreach to take further action.

RSGB EMC Committee Survey (Closes 30th September 2017) - tinyurl.com/GB2RS-0309A

ARRL vDSL Interference - http://www.arrl.org/dsl-interference

March 2006 ECC Report 79 High Capacity DSL Systems - http://www.erodocdb.dk/Docs/doc98/official/pdf/ECCRep079.pdf

Eighteen BBC Local Radio Stations Fall Silent

Eighteen BBC Local Radio services went off-air recently due to major technical problems around the network.

The stations affected all use the BBC ViLoR system – which connects local radio studios with servers in London rather than use local hard drives for music, audio and studio software.

A total of 33 transmitters on FM, DAB and AM went quiet before stations started rebroadcasting BBC5 live. Shortly afterwards stations reconnected to their transmitters via ISDN but online streams remained on 5 live.

“Technical problems are continuing to affect output at a number of BBC Local Radio stations this morning, including at BBC Three Counties. Engineers are working to fix the problem but at the moment it’s not known how long it will be before normal service resumes.”

— BBC Annoucement

BBC Three Counties updated listeners at midday saying they are back on-air locally but unable to play any jingles, songs or recorded voice reports. Phone lines were down across the network but the text-in number worked as normal.

“We’ve been having a couple of technical issues today but our engineers are working hard behind the scenes to resume normal service as soon as possible.”

— BBC Essex Tweet

It's claimed one or more BBC ViLoR radio services on all platforms suffered an outage, resulting from an equipment failure.

The BBC said BT has confirmed that the issue was caused by an engineer carrying out pre-work activities in Oxford where a fibre tray was disturbed at the time of the incident.