Hi Paul, I saw your post and thought I would respond. I found the HackRF a while back, it's a comparable instrument to one which my company sells for PLC, just so you know, and I've developed the PC software for displaying the data. RF and metering is an area we've done a lot of work in, and SDR is really improving diagnostics for field work.
By now you've learned that PRIME is a star network, that doesn't use mesh, and for diagnostic purposes, the strobe beacon is a real pain. It's basically the same as token ring if you remember IBM's old network technology. It sends out a pulse every few milliseconds and thus tells the meters when they can talk. If you setup anything, you need to be able to look at buffers in between different samples in order to see anything of value, (you need to have a FFT data rate under 50-60 ms per buffer and be able to look at individual FFT curves). Otherwise the beacon will kill any detail that would be of interest. Different modes are interesting for lab work and checking performance, but not really in the field, other than to point to general problem areas. On the AC communication side you need to be able to find a particular AC/DC network adapter in a substation area of 3 - 400 homes / apartments. (It's something we also do for various utilities.) Though this is less interesting in your case with DC connections. However, having done a little TPC and FTT10 between substations, cables running in parallel, (signal transfer from non-shielded cables or heavily loaded power cable proximity), and splices can definitely create problems. For PRIME 1.3.6 you need 1024 samples at 250 kHz, and the signal is between 41 and 89 kHz. PRIME 1.4 has 4096 samples at 1.0 MHz and uses 41 to 472 kHz. Good luck! Sincerely, Fred -- View this message in context: http://gnuradio.4.n7.nabble.com/Power-Line-Communications-GNURadio-tp59330p59429.html Sent from the GnuRadio mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
