Greetings. Yesterday, the deadline for BPL reply comments in Docket 04-37, we filed ours. A copy is attached, along with a copy of Exhibit A, a technical study well-prepared by Ed Hare.

Thanks to the Executive Committee, and especially Dave Sumner and Jay Bellows, for helpful edits to these, and Jon Siverling came up with some important material that we used in addressing the Brazil study of signal decay with distance. Our reply comments are persuasive, we believe. The tone of these, like that of the initial comments, is harsh, but that continues a theme here. We are alone in urging additional restrictions on BPL, and we have caught the FCC in a classic coverup. Some righteous indignation is amply justified here.

Unlike many rulemaking proceedings, the filing of comments and reply comments is not sufficient in this case. The BPL advocates saved most of their ammunition for their reply comments, filed yesterday, so that we wouldn't have any chance to rebut their arguments fair and square. Ambient, for example, filed no comments at all, but came up at the last second of the reply comment period with 400 pages of studies of signal decay with distance. Typical of the ethics of the BPL companies. By contrast, ARRL took the high road, and put ARRL's studies out for all to see in comments and reply comments.

So, the real reply comment period, for us, begins now. We will have to do some extensive ex parte filings which Ed Hare is working on already. We are setting up appointments for President Harrison and EVP Sumner and me with FCC Commissioners. And we will probably have to make at least one direct presentation to the scoundrels at OET, bringing Ed Hare in. The Executive Committee will evaluate our strategy from here at its upcoming meeting on October 24.

If you don't mind frustrating yourselves in the meantime, I urge you to go to the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) at the FCC web site, and look at the recently filed reply comments (other than ours) in ET Docket 04-37. You will see what we have to deal with here going forward. I think you will get a sense, however, that we have drawn some blood, given the tenor of the reply comments, most of which are pretty much straight denials of ARRL's arguments. Several of the reply comments (like several of the comments) are merely repetitions of the comments of HomePlug, and read almost identically.

Christopher D. Imlay
Booth, Freret, Imlay & Tepper. P.C.
14356 Cape May Road
Silver Spring, Maryland 20904-6011
(301) 384-5525 telephone
(301) 384-6384 facsimile
W3KD@ARRL.ORG