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Re: [OM] It'sPi Day!--now Day after Pi Day!-- Mandatory list assignments

Subject: Re: [OM] It'sPi Day!--now Day after Pi Day!-- Mandatory list assignments.
From: Chris Trask <christrask@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 08:10:41 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
>
>>      During my first two years of undergraduate school I was a terminal 
>>operator at the York campus, helping other undergrads with whatever 
>>problems they encountered.  It used the telephone lines at a 300 baud 
>>rate, and if there was a significant storm between there and the main 
>>campus at University Park the whole thing would come crashing down.  
>>Similar to 19CL on occasion.
>
>I was going to say "what's changed"? The fact is that we're still
>using the same telephone lines installed sixty years ago. Lot's of
>lead-sheathed, air-core, paper-wrap copper feeds out there. We had a
>MWB (Moron With Backhoe) take out a multi-thousand pair (I think it
>was 6000 pair) main feed that was encased in six inches of concrete in
>downtown Lincoln, NE. It took 20 techs working around the clock for
>over a week to fix that one. But in Eastern Kentucky, the copper lines
>there are pretty new. They keep getting stolen. Seriously. We've lost
>over seven miles of copper lines in a single night. We probably
>average 500 feet of stolen line every night.
>

     A few years ago my phone would go out every time it rained a quarter inch 
or more.  It took the techs months to track it down.  Turned out that the above 
ground cable went to a terminal box about 200 feet away and then through an 
underground cable for another 200 feet to another terminal box.  That box was 
forever being hit by a car despite having four concrete filled pylons around 
it.  It was covered with a Hefty lawn bag.  When there was sufficient rain the 
runoff would enter through a crack in the outer sheath and then saturate the 
wool layer, which would short out my pair.

     I recently had the phone go out due to a broken ground wire at that first 
terminal box.  I got into a short conversation with the tech about using a TDR, 
and he showed me the one he carried.  Pretty nice piece of gear, slightly 
larger than a multimeter.  He had tracked down the fault by just testing the 
resistance of the wires and calculating the distance, which was pretty sharp.


Chris

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro 
     - Hunter S. Thompson
-- 
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