atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Member Forums Telephones & Systems Photos Interesting color code

Just make it up as you go, I guess.

For some unexplainable reason...while I was looking at the pictures...I heard Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" inside of my head.

I had a tech do that ONCE while terminating a backboard for the customers 1A2 key system. Cables were not long enough to re-terminate so the corrections had to be made through the x-connecting.


He was color blind.

If that is an OSP cable, it needs to terminated on a primary protector. It is a lightning bolt away from burning down the building.

That's funny. All I could hear was "I Do It The WRONG WAY!" Years ago, I knew a long time Bell Telephone station repair man that was color blind. All the crafts people knew, but the foremen didn't. I followed him, one time, on a job and had to terminate a 25 pair on the far end. Of course I followed standard color code. I got a call a few days later and was told NOTHING connected to that cable worked. Not having seen the near end, I decided to start there. Much to my amazement, the cable was paired, but in a way that, the only way to know what was what you had to know how he terminated his end. After that little adventure, I ALSO knew, from that time forward, that he was color blind. I asked him about that and his reply was "Pairs are pairs. Just find them." He was a permanent repair man in a large office building and seldom required any help. I avoided that building. He's retired, but I see him, from time to time, and he still thinks his way was OK.

Arthur is correct. It looks like an OSP cable and it MUST be terminated on a protector block. That is a real dangerous situation for the crafts people working on that as well as a fire hazard.

Rcaman

The 100 pair is a customer owned figure 8 aerial cable. The strand isn't terminated to anything at this end.it goes into the conduit and underground, but I don't know if it's conduit all the way or not. Wouldn't surprise me if it went direct buried a foot below the conduit/ground level. This whole mess is going to be tore out for a building project this fall.

Not an "interesting" color code. An "incorrect" color code.

I have here among my favorite telephone repair souvenirs a chunk of 25-pair Cat5e cable (don't ask) terminated on a 66M block. It was found by me when I was called, via a third party vendor of Hoot&Holler over IP equipment, when their client, a well-known Wall Street stock trading business, couldn't get anything working at a new satellite storefront location.

The "installer," an employee of the client, whose business card identified him as a "Vice President / Telecom" did not know about the physical make-up of a Cat5e terminal block, with the slight spacing differential between pairs, did not understand the concept of "color code" and probably wouldn't be able, in the words of an old foreman of mine, "to tell a diode from a Buick."

In descending order, he punched down a pair, then left a half-pair, then punched down another pair, then left a half pair, etc, so that when he was finished, there were more wires left over than there were pins on the block. Here's the color "code" that he used:

24 vio/brn

skip one pin

15 blk/sl

skip one pin

14 blk/brn

skip one pin

25 vio/sl

skip one pin

23 vio/grn

skip one pin

17 yel/or

skip one pin

19 yel/brn

skip one pin

11 blk/bl

skip one pin

22 vio/or

skip one pin

4 wh/brn

skip one pin

21 vio/bl

skip one pin

3 wh/grn

The rest of the pairs were left hanging.

He did not mount the block on an 89-type bracket, and the sheath of the cable was stripped back 6 inches or so and left flying.

Another story about a screw-up employee: I had been retired a few years, going about my new business as an interconnect owner, and ordered a 13th POTS line for a client. I trenched in two 12-pair BSW's and abandoned the original 12-pair, because it was noisy and went to a point in the building that was not really an efficient location. The two new service wires went from the eye-level terminal on the pole to the basement of the subscriber. I transferred over all 12 original lines, placed the order for the 13th line, and waited. And waited.

I got a text saying that the 13th line had been installed, but when I listened to the 13th pair (Blue/white of the 2nd cable) I heard nuttin. I tried running the block to trip the line. Nuttin. I tried going across each pair. Nuttin.

I went out to the pole to see what had happened to my dial tone, and found that the elderly VZ retired employee, whom I knew to be a station installer, working per diem for the summer, had used the green (R) side of the red/green pair, and the red (T) side of the red/brown pair. When I caught up with him a few days later, and interrogated him as why he used the Ring side of pair 20, and the Tip side of pair 21, when he should have used the T&R of pair 13, he said that the first pair is always red-green, and he made a mistake by using split pairs, but "what difference does it make...you found the line, didn't you?"

Apparently, in his long career, the most complicated wiring scheme he had ever encountered was a 42A block fed with a quad wire. First pair, red/green.