You might not hear any SW radio, but your house wiring radiates out from you home and down the street. Let me assure you, if you lived in a deep cave, 1/2 mile from any signs of life and fed with mains cabling and use these, your noisy RF will exit the mains cable feeding your house. The marketing blurb tells you that you fuse box or meter will stop the RF, they don’t and cannot do so - they are not RF filters, but mostly passive devices. They operate at frequencies way beyond SW, but can be heard wiping out RF in the VHF and UHF bands and some cause harmonically generated noise up into the low GHz bands (such as Wi-Fi/Bluetooth). They are a hazard to all legitimate radio users.
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What sort of filtering do you recommend at the service panel, then? I’m comfortable working with high current and voltage.
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PowerLine is very hit or miss depending on the quality of your home’s wiring, and how direct of a path it follows from point to point. The longer the run, or the more junctions you have, the worse your performance is likely to be. It’s definitely not some modern miracle but it can be worth a try if nothing else works well.
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I’ve heard that complaint before about tradesfolks and their (former) homes. It seems like the last thing you want to do when you get home is more work.
That’s why I try to slack off all I can at work. Not that it helps… my house is still on the verge of falling apart. 
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If Powerline ethernet works for you, then great! If not, return them - no problem most places - you’ll know pretty quick. and BTW, I use this exact setup to gain wifi upstairs at the back of the house.
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It’s IMPOSSIBLE to filter these, if you could they’d stop working.
Power Line Ethernet adapters are absolutely terrible. They destroy the entire shortwave radio spectrum in quite a big radius, as some other commenter already pointed out. Besides that, they are totally unrealiable.
That makes zero sense to me. Preventing upstream signal flow is physically distinct from blocking downstream.
If people are going to claim that powerline interference obeys unique physical laws that other RF interference doesn’t, I’m not going to try to accommodate their concerns, any more than I accommodate the beliefs of people who think their TVs are sentient. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford the time to follow up on such an extremely unlikely claim.
I have three, which operate with 100% reliability, which casts doubt on the accuracy of your other claim.
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What would be the point?
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The RF radiates from your home wiring and with propagation, they can cause
interference to people you can’t hear yourself, in some cases harmonically
over many bands including some reserved for military and airband useage,
but you wouldn’t know it.
I’m willing to take steps to prevent interfering with ham radio operators, if they can show me the harm and what I should do about it. But showing me pictures of oscilloscopes and the like hundreds of miles from me doesn’t really show me anything I can relate to my own use. I used to do shortwave, and I have a friend less than ten miles off who still does, and he’s not concerned at all about my powerline adapters. I stopped doing SW before I got the powerline adapters because you can’t receive squat in my little valley.
As for military and airline communications, the soldiers and giant corporations can look out for themselves. That’s how they treat me, so that’s how I’ll treat them.
The idea that powerline ethernet became legal despite interfering with planes and military seems highly unlikely anyway, especially since true 56Kbps modem protocols never became legal (USA limit is 53.3 downlink, 33.6 uplink, and that’s as fast as a 56Kbps modem can go.)
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I’ve been running Powerline in various spots since 2009 or so. No outages or breaking, rarely need to be reset more than local power outages handle for me with this set. Earlier models would require more frequent powering on and off but were never a problem.
Notably – when I reset all the gear to solve a routing issue in the house, attempt to get back on-line, etc… I never touch the power line kit. It JFW and doesn’t need to be in that cycle/loop.
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I appreciate your willingness to mitigate the interference they cause, I
respect that. The organizations I gave as examples are only 2 out of the
hundreds of thousands of potential victims - The problem is, the victims
don’t know the what interference sounds like to them if they used digital
radio (the effect is different to analogue). This manifests itself as
signal distortion to the radio and the radio stops decoding the data so
nothing can be hear at all, no his, no silence - just silence, at best you
might get choppy audio. This is evident with DAB radio when domestic users
of DAB radio find it works great until one of their neighbours starts
watching netflix and wipes out the RF spectrum. Other issues caused by
these devices in the past have included car keyfobs / garage door openers
being jammed until the offending device is switched off.
If RF is heard in the sky by pilots, I’m sure the practice in the US is the
similar to the UK, it’s reported, and an engineer in a small plane is sent
to investigate and if the levels of noise hear is over the acceptable
level, they pay the offending home a visit to seize the offending hardware,
failure to relinquish the hardware will result in serious fines /
imprisonment.
The lay version of why and how they cause interference - RF needs to travel
using balanced (and shielded)cable to its destination, if it isn’t
balanced RF leaks from the cable and can become distorted in the process.
Balanced cable, is usually terminated with 1 radiating component (an
antenna) this is also a tuned/balanced part. The RF is send on a single
frequency and uses as little bandwidth as is possible to meaningful
transmission of whatever is being modulated. The modulations are send using
a smooth sine wave. If it’s not a smooth sine wave it also causes
distortion and introduces harmonically related noise - this is RF radiated
on frequencies that are multiples of the intended frequency. These devices
go against all these requirements for a clean and ideal signal. They are
broadband, and often transmit consistently (far from an ideal use of the
congested RF spectrum), They use far more power than they need too. The
transmit a very noisey harmonically rich, and distorted waveform, often
modulated from a crude, non-pure sine wave. While some use notches, this
only hide parts of the noise from a select part of the spectrum, but A)
this still can cause interference inside the notches on harmonics of
frequencies used by them, and B) the inclusion of notches is an admission
they are an RF pollutant. The wiring inside a home is not designed for
passing RF, as it’s is neither shielded, nor balanced, or terminated with a
tuned antenna. This means the wiring in your home is radiating like a poor
antenna not tuned for any one frequency, but possibly several frequencies
in different parts of your home.
There are other things wrong with them too - They are small computers, they
get warm and if left plugged in they will be at the usual risk of dust
collecting inside the air vents, the models with air vents that is, and
those without, get warmer still. This opens up the risk of fire, is a few
cases at least. Then their is the RF being heard, and decoded over a mile
away because your device is sending RF that far down the mains cable. With
one the average noise level is increased a little in one location, with
several scattered over a neighbourhood the RF noise level increases a lot,
and with many hundreds of thousands they are like listening to the jungle
with every animal screaming and hollering at each other 24/7. They raise
the noise floor so much you start to need more RF to be heard over the
wasted RF from these things. This is counterintuitive.
The final issue I wanted to draw attention to is the victims - The noise
affects different types of RF hardware in different ways, but with voice
communications used by the emergency services, they can be unable to hear
the communications from a control room giving life saving instructions or
advice. Search and rescue teams may placed themselves at increased danger
because they cannot hear vital messages, and in the past aircraft have been
downed due to poor communications. With aircraft the affect is vastly more
serious, A plane crashing into a building is something we have all
unfortunately seen, and with transmission in the sky, RF can really travel
- right the way around the planet in ideal conditions, and aircraft use
many radios, some analogue, and some digital to send and receive telemetry
data such as location, GPS and weather warnings. If you’ve ever been in an
aircraft, you will know that during take off and landing all electrical
devices are supposed to be switched off - because the sensitive radios on a
plane can be confused by the microscopic levels of RF leaked by the digital
circuits (and with analogue circuits too, for example an AM radio could
cause heterodyning whistles on the AM radio used by the pilots to talk to
the control tower).
The alternative? I recommend the faster, more reliable installation of
Ethernet. It can increase the value of a home, and Ethernet will always be
more secure, and much much faster, and more reliable than any other snake
oil method.
I don’t understand the modem legality reference. a telephone modem doesn’t
really bare any relevance as far as I can see. As for showing oscilloscope
screens and demonstrating the noise - I have a real life problem cause by a
neighbour who has one on 24/7 and as a result, my DAB doesnt work and I am
no longer able to hear most of the radio stations I used hear because of
the intense noise levels.
Sorry it’s quite long, but I did try to simplify it as mush as I can to
make it clear why these are not fit for purpose. The only thing to add is
my guess as to why they exist at all? Big business pays big back
handers/taxes and can get away with anything if there is loop hole to allow
it.
Whatever you chose to do, I hope you feel a little better informed.
The link between the barn and house is 100 amps, precisely equal length wires twisted evenly. The wiring inside the barn is in conduit under a metal roof. Unfortunately the house wires are a mix of every crazy thing used in the last 200 years so that’s more the kind of thing you’re talking about. (All the newer wiring is either in conduit or BX armored cable with the armor grounded, because that’s how I roll 
.)
I have cat6 to most rooms, ran it through the lath & plaster walls myself. The powerline ethernet is to get from the main house out to the barn/garage/stable outbuilding, because it’s going to be extremely difficult to trench through the tarmac, buried concrete walls and gigantic tree roots to run ethernet between buildings. I’ll do it eventually, though.
Security is not really an issue; I pretty much encrypt everything, and all my powerline ethernet traffic is heavily encrypted. The gadgets are sealed, no vents, and they don’t get hot.
Supposedly if you run a 56Kbps modem protocol on a POTS line it turns into an antenna that interferes with airplane & military communications. So that’s illegal. If you buy a 56Kb modem, it will not run at 56Kb, it will run at 33.6 (upstream, that is - ISPs can run 53.3 downstream).
That’s why I brought up the legal restrictions on modems. Big business tried and failed to get those lifted.
I’d go over and knock on his door and volunteer to help run ethernet for him, personally; I find that sort of approach usually pays off. But you could also call the FCC and have them send one of their detector vans out.
I can hardly complain about other people’s long posts! I’ve put up a fair number of wall’o’text postings… thanks for the info.
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