YOUR ADDRESS                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                         March   ,  2006

Mr. Richard M. Kessel
Chairman  LIPA
333 Earl Ovington Blvd.  Suite 403
Uniondale, NY  11553  

Re:  LIPA and “BPL”  

Dear Mr. Kessel,  

I have been a licensed Amateur Radio operator for   ….. years and live in town, LI, NY.  As a LIPA rate payer I am concerned about what your company is about to do regarding BPL as I have thousands of dollars invested in Amateur radio equipment that may become useless if you deploy a BPL system that creates noise in the RF spectrum in the 2 to 30 MHz range.  

I respectfully request that LIPA choose a BPL service provider that uses equipment that will not cause interference with Amateur Radio and other licensed services.  Please enlist the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to help LIPA choose the equipment that will generate the least interference to other services.  To avoid interference to licensed Amateur Radio operators your BPL system should:

      ·       not place BPL signals on the low voltage distribution lines
·       should screen or notch all Amateur frequencies
·       Not employ BPL in the 2 to 30 MHz range
·       Enlist ARRL’s help in choosing a system that avoids RF pollution

According to current FCC figures there are over 6,000 licensed Amateur Radio operators living in Nassau and Suffolk counties on LI.   Were LIPA to implement an Ambient type BPL island-wide there would be many irate FCC license holders who had invested thousand of dollars in HF transceivers (which cost from $1,000 to $3,000) and other associated equipment which would be virtually useless because of the BPL noise levels they were receiving.  That’s a lot very unhappy rate payers.

Amateurs in general are in favor of broadband.  We like it and we use it and believe that everyone should have it but not at the cost of making it impossible to use our precious high frequency (HF 3 to 30 MHz) allocations.  We are not against progress, just against radio frequency pollution.

BPL providers have made installations in only a small portion of the US so we have yet to see the full scope of the problem.  Some BPL providers seem to ignore that their system is unshielded and that they will also be subject to incoming interference to their systems from licensed radio transmitters operating near their customers.  Tests indicate that even a low powered Amateur station at about 100 watts will cause problems for BPL reception.  As we are licensed to operate up to 1500 watts this could be a real problem for service reliability.   As we are licensed we will not have to shut down as the Part 15 service, BPL in this case, will simply have to accept the interference it may receive from taxi cabs, police, fire, business radio services, or Amateur operators, all licensed services.

As one of very many active licensed Amateur Radio operators on Long Island I strongly request that you please don’t deploy BPL equipment that will cause interference and severely limit our ability to provide emergency communications.

Sincerely,

                                     Your name and callsign