Continued from: Jobs I've Had - Telecom Australia (1) As I mentioned previously, after completing one month of general training at the Chermside Training Centre I was temporarily allocated to Sherwood Exchange Maintenance Group - EMG for short. Sherwood EMG consisted of about 15 to 20 staff who undertook operations and maintenance work at Sherwood, Jamboree Heights, Darra, Wacol and Inala telephone exchanges. Staff members were generally allocated to one of those places but a few people were mobile and had use of company cars to get from place to place. We only had 3 or 4 cars for the entire staff to share as most people went to and from work in their private cars. On my first day here I was taken to Inala Exchange and met the technician and assistant technician who spent most days there. The assistant technician was Andy who, as it turned out, was the father of a girl I was at high school with - maybe it is a small world. Andy was my mentor for this period and he showed me how to connect and disconnect ordinary telephone services, or make changes such as somebody moving house within the same area, or requesting a change of phone number. Inala exchange had 7000 telephone lines with each and every one appearing as a pair of copper wires of a large Main Distribution Frame (MDF). The MDF was where the phone line was connected to copper cables which ran underground to each and every house and business in the surrounding suburbs. Copper cables as big as 2400 pairs of wires appeared on the MDF to allow connection and testing of phone services. To connect a telephone service the first step was to connect the cable pair allocated that ran to the address where the phone was being connected, to the telephone number which had been allocated, This information, along with the persons name, address and other information was originally sent by Telex from the Sales area. Red and white jumper wire was for an ordinary telephone service while green and white was for a special service like a pay phone or a data line to a bank. The photo below shows one style of MDF block with 50 pairs on it, and the jumper wires added to connect the cable pair to the phone number. On the internal or telephone number side of the MDF the jumper wires were run vertically, while on the external or cable side the jumper wires were run horizontally. The long and tall MDF had travelling ladders on both sides to make the task easier. Sometimes only a short piece of jumper wire was needed to cross from one side to the other, other times you had to run the wires from one end to the other using one or two of the travelling ladders. The bigger the exchange the bigger the MDF that was needed for the thousands upon thousands of connections. The vast majority of these jumper wire connections were soldered and several 50 volt soldering irons were placed on the MDF for this purpose. At the beginning of the day you would turn them on, and before going home you had to remember to turn them off. There was also a pair of small metal links on each cable pair and phone number which had to be inserted to make a connection - these were normally left in, but could be removed for testing purposes. Running the jumper wires to connect the phone number to the cable pair was only the first task, there were records to be written out, a meter which had to be read to record the number of phone calls made, and some data which needed to be programmed. To be continued.....
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AuthorI love to understand things, how they work, why they happen - I'm always learning and keen to investigate... Archives
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