[Charlug] posscon + PLC

[Mike Harrison]

>
> http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
>
> My dad was a life long amateur radio enthusiast. He talked about this 15
> years ago.

Thankfully, BROADBAND over power lines has died.
It doesn't work well in the real world. 
I do a lot of communications over power lines, at reasonable frequencies
and bandwidth (about 5k BITS per second), the higher speed stuff
is a venture capital driven black hole and pipe dream.

In Charlotte and other Duke Energy area's, they are installing
Echelon brand residential meters that use "LonTalk" PLC for meter reading
and meter control. It doesn't hop transformers well (1 to 3)
and uses cell modems or other methods for the main backhaul.
All of the PLC communications level is encrypted, keys on each device
are pre-shared/accepted per node, tough stuff.

The current version of the meters are running vxworks, the
newest ones are running an embedded linux variant.

Note: hacking an electric meter will get you in jail, quickly.
With these meters especially. Lots of "tamper detection" technology
at work. If you really want to hack on these, legally, I might have a job 
for you: mike.public at utiliflex.com  http://www.utiliflex.com