A coupling strategy with automatic time diversity to counter rectifier impulsive noise

Abstract

Previously, it was shown that Capacitor Current Coupling (CCC) is a feasible technique to receive a PLC signal in current form, during the charging time when an electrolytic capacitor short-circuits ordinary PLC reception. In this paper, the shortcomings of this CCC technique is overcome by combining it with ordinary capacitive voltage coupling, so that the two coupling techniques automatically take turns in the time domain to effect a time diversity coupling strategy. The above technique was implemented using Texas Instruments PLC demonstration kits that deploy the G3 open metering standard, with the goal to show improved BER performance under constrained receiving power conditions. A half-wave rectifier power supply was used, while the electrolytic capacitor was varied (amongst other parameters) to demonstrate the impact of such impulsive noise on BER. Also, improved performance is shown, caused by automatic time-diversity of the CCC and standard couplers.