Continued from: Jobs I've Had - Telecom Australia (4) After completing my six months of field training at Sherwood EMG it was back to Chermside and the Telecom Australia Training School. If this phase I completed the common theory and practical courses, and started into job specific training. For the job specific courses I was sent to Hesketh House in Brisbane. This is probably not a building many have heard of and the entrance we used was actually through Telecommunications House which was at 283 Elizabeth Street - opposite Edison Telephone Exchange.
Hesketh House by the 1980's was owned by Telecom Australia and had some sections of the training branch located there. The job specific courses I attended were in the operation and maintenance of the crossbar telephone exchange equipment, which is what I had seen at Inala and Wacol. In fact a very large proportion of the entire Brisbane telephone network was at this time crossbar; the next generation equipment known as AXE was just entering the scene. The crossbar exchange equipment at Inala and the other four exchanges in the Sherwood EMG area connected the 27000 telephone lines for private customers and businesses in that area with the rest of Australia and the world. In the basement level of Hesketh House there was an entire 'model' exchange that apprentice technicians could work on, finding faults and learning the complexities of the equipment, without any interruption to public telephone calls. The photo below shows the back of some crossbar switches and hopefully gives a small sample of the complexity of the equipment and wiring involved. The crossbar telephone exchange was largely electro-mechanical in design, in other words, relays - and there were thousands of them each with a specific function and designation code. There were several courses to attend here as each section of the crossbar exchange was explained in great detail. The block diagram in Jobs I've Had - Telecom Australia (4) gives an idea of the complexity, and there were nine courses in total with each lasting at least a week and involving theory and practical training. We had to know how every section of the exchange worked:
That is putting it all very simply as even the first stage, the subscriber stage, had a number of steps to work through. Firstly the hundreds digit of the number making the call was identified, then the tens digit, then the units digit - this information, along with the thousands digit, was transferred to other equipment as the connection process continued. If two people lifted the handset to make a call at the same time the equipment would have to process one request first then the second. Considering the telephone lines were grouped into sections of 1000 phone lines, several people could lift the handset at the same time - the circuitry was designed to deal with each phone call in a fraction of a second so even if it was very busy the customer hardly noticed any delay. The final course was conducted in Sydney at the New South Wales Telecom Australia Training Centre at North Strathfield. This particular piece of equipment that apprentice technicians needed to work on and learn about only existed in Sydney so apprentices from all over Australia visited North Strathfield for this course. I decided to stay at Strathfield, near the railway station, and catch the train each day to North Strathfield where a short walk was all that was needed to get to the course venue. I stayed at the Strathfield Hotel, near the railway station and Strathfield Plaza shopping centre. The later place would become famous in August 1991 when a gunman killed 7 people and injured 6 more before killing himself. I had certainly walked through this shopping plaza on several occasions during my visit in the 1980's as it was just a three minute walk from where I was staying. 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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