A field trial of medium voltage power line communication system for AMR and DAS

In this paper, a test field of high-data rate PLC using overhead medium voltage power line (MV BPLC) for applications to automatic meter reading (AMR) and distribution automation system (DAS) is introduced. It was established in Jeju island, Korea and 8.2 km long. For the MV BPLC, a MV coupler for BPLC with internal impedance matching transformer was developed. For repeating, techniques of both time division (TD) and frequency division (FD) were properly used. There were strong impulsive noises caused by lightning arresters. The impulsive noise degrades severely performance of MV BPLC because the impulsive noise gives direct influence on data signal. To solve the problem of the impulsive noise, the lightning arresters that are noise sources were found using inductive coupler for medium voltage and replaced with new ones. Finally, we found that the system has more than 2 Mbps TCP data rate and can be used as a communication network for AMR and DAS.