TheWaterboy
Lifetime Supporting Member + Moderator
I have a pump house and a tank well over a mile apart. The pump house is hardwired to the tank via direct buried telco cable. Mind you this was done decades ago and the 2 PLC5 based stations have communicated over DH+ all this time and still do today. A 1785-KE module sits on one of them that has a DF1 radio attached to it. The lower PLC5 sends its info to the upper PLC and all data is retrieved over radio from the upper PLC. All this works fine most of the year. Each fall the first lightning strikes somehow induce into the DH+ cable enough energy to blow up the DH+ channels. These PLC'5 need to go anyway so a radio was going to be needed.
So with garlic around my neck I was able find the right combination of a licensed terrain hugging frequency, Bat Wings and a little Eye of Newt to make a RF connection on the lower station possible and it in fact works quite well.
So my question about all this pertains to MSG routing. While this is temporary I am curious... I now have 2 forms of communication media connected at the same time. I have verified that if I turn off one radio I can still reach both stations using the other radio's DF1 and then through some PLC routing magic through the DH+ wire to the remaining station. Leaving everything connected seems to pose no problems but I know I have created a serial loop. If this were Ethernet this would grind to a halt but it doesn't seem to bother the serial link at all.
So what determines the path the packets take when there are more than one path? Since everything serial on these requires a KE module... The PLC has to assume everything is on DH+. So what decides if a MSG gets sent to the radio via serial or DH+ directly?
I would guess it would broadcast out both ports?
And certainly DH+ is faster than RF but that doesn't mean that the radio didn't also send the packets and if true that will clog up the airwaves.
Am I imagining a problem that isn't really a problem?
So with garlic around my neck I was able find the right combination of a licensed terrain hugging frequency, Bat Wings and a little Eye of Newt to make a RF connection on the lower station possible and it in fact works quite well.
So my question about all this pertains to MSG routing. While this is temporary I am curious... I now have 2 forms of communication media connected at the same time. I have verified that if I turn off one radio I can still reach both stations using the other radio's DF1 and then through some PLC routing magic through the DH+ wire to the remaining station. Leaving everything connected seems to pose no problems but I know I have created a serial loop. If this were Ethernet this would grind to a halt but it doesn't seem to bother the serial link at all.
So what determines the path the packets take when there are more than one path? Since everything serial on these requires a KE module... The PLC has to assume everything is on DH+. So what decides if a MSG gets sent to the radio via serial or DH+ directly?
I would guess it would broadcast out both ports?
And certainly DH+ is faster than RF but that doesn't mean that the radio didn't also send the packets and if true that will clog up the airwaves.
Am I imagining a problem that isn't really a problem?