Thread: On a scale of "1 to German", how pedantic is this?

My cousin who is an electrical engineer sent me this

Back in the 1970's I did some summer work as a tech assistant wiring a new crossbar telephone exchange in Clayton. Stacks of 100 pair cables came in from the streets and fed down through tall MDF frames for termination. The cables were all laced together into tidy blocks using waxed string and a flat hooked lacing needle. Time consuming but it looked nice and the pairs were terminated by stripping, wrapped and soldered. I noticed at the time that the newer the cable blocks became throughout the exchange the less skilled and or diligent was the lacing... I suppose these days they just randomly bundle stuff together with cable ties and punch down the unstripped ends. I don't remember anybody using a tone generator to trace cables then, so I guess they had to have a better physical way of tracing cables visually. The OCD in me still likes nice neat orderly cable runs.

Originally Posted by rwbuild

In another life I built a house for a navy electrician on submarines and he did the electrical on his house, talk about OCD!!!! like the control panel in the photo, every wire was laid straight as a gun barrel, 90 deg bends everywhere and even the printing on the cabling was oriented face up and aligned with its neighbour if there was one. All clips were 200mm apart and every room had its own circuit breaker power and lights!

Unfortunately that mindset also occurs on telecommunications radio & mobiles sites using waveguides from the antennas to the equipment. We have seen quite a few examples from contractors building mobiles sites. Looks very neat and pretty but not good from a performance aspect. When you see neat and pretty it usually means a lot of non-compliance notices will issue on the external build. Radio waves don't go around 90 degree bends so well, but will follow nice gentle loopy curves. There is beauty and pride of workmanship evident in well formed waveguide bends and engineered waveguide "plumbing."

I was never a telco tech, just a humble surveyor in the background, but got to see some of the marvels of radio technology when we built the microwave bearer systems in the 1970's onwards. Some of the transitions from waveguides to the equipment were marvels of engineering and manufacturing technology using materials and production methods of the highest quality. Sadly most of it went into scrap metal skips in the 2000's.

I wonder if these nice tight bends in HV wiring are creating localized hot spots where cable conductors have potentially been damaged in the forming / bending process????

Meanwhile....

You can still see the patch panels...
I've worked in rooms like this..

https://goo.gl/images/LW7izY



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The exchange MDF's were a work of art - https://www.google.com.au/search?q=m...aSHzu4S2FldIM: