Sure, as long as you are transmitting around 60 Hz. The big, iron transformer on the pole outside doesn't pass much HF. If you could couple to the primary side, you might get a little.
I was Up Nort in the Michigan farmland and there was a power line that ran through the fields on wooden poles. I had a roll of electric fence wire and some \spare time, so I nailed it up on the poles for a LONG way. The adjacent farms were relatives. I connected to my Signal One and the noise was 20 over S-9. I didn't even bother to transmit, because I would never be able to hear an answer. I'm lucky I didn't blow out the front end with induced AC. While there I also tried a Gotham Vertical on top of the steel water well casing of a 117 foot well. I thought that this was the best ground rod ever. That worked as a great dummy load. Tuned up fine, never worked anybody on it. Gotta have radials. While I was at Michigan State U in the 1960's I worked on our dorm's carrier-current AM station. I think it was on 620 KHz. We connected to an outlet on the men's side of the six-story dorm, but we had no signal on the women's side, as there was a transformer in between. I got to go down into the steam tunnels to run a coax over to the girl's side with a coupling capacitor. We used a Heathkit DX-60 as our transmitter! The bandswitch and tapped coil were removed and a long piece of Air-Dux got the LC down to 0.6 MHz. The circulating current was so high that the plastic in the Air-Dux coil started to melt and sag. We put a fan on top of the DX-60 blowing down, not so much to cool the 6146 final as to keep the coil cool! Part of the jock's start up sequence was to plug in the fan. That DX-60 ran for years with 12 hour broadcasting days. Mike - AA8K Gerald Capodieci wrote: > My SDRs keeps being described as a "Virtual or Imaginary Radio" by the owners > of radios with real knobs, buttons, lights and switches. I've been reading > the articles related to broad band over power lines for several years and > just wonder if we can use them too. Has anyone safely been able use these > local network of power lines as a virtual antenna? This way we can share them > as: RFPL/BBPL partners and all should be happy. Using them would certainly > round out the concept of a virtual radio and eliminate otherwise unsightly > real antennas. _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
