There's a crew running fiber optic cable along the road in front of the house. The county is setting up a system where all of the traffic lights are interconnected by ethernet over fiber so they can monitor status and the traffic and control the lights from a central location in a nearby town.
They moved the equipment to where I have a front row seat. I may have seen it done around the train tracks but it never sunk in how the system works.
They a hydraulic-powered machine on tracks with a line running off to a separate tank truck for water. The machine is a water cooled? ram with a load of pipes in a sling. Each pipe looks to be about 10 feet long. The machine loads a pipe and screws it onto the end of the previous line and pushes and bores the whole thing into the dirt. By where the remote crew goes I gotta figure they can burrow out 200 to 300 feet.
I have no idea how they manage to steer the far end. The road curves and goes uphill ahead! I noticed that they have a digital scanner box that must let them scope out where the bit end is, but how they can turn it is beyond me. At junctions they bring the bit end to the surface. I don't see any sign that the guy in the ram is driving it.
At the junction they attach the conduit and/or fiber to the far end and the machine pulls it back one pipe length at a time like fishing conduit. I guess they make a trench between two junctions. Come to think of it they must have to splice at each meet up point because they pull back to the previous - They don't pull in the direction they travel.
Wild. No wonder fiber runs are expensive but I guess it would be worse if they really had to dig a trench the whole length.
They moved the equipment to where I have a front row seat. I may have seen it done around the train tracks but it never sunk in how the system works.
They a hydraulic-powered machine on tracks with a line running off to a separate tank truck for water. The machine is a water cooled? ram with a load of pipes in a sling. Each pipe looks to be about 10 feet long. The machine loads a pipe and screws it onto the end of the previous line and pushes and bores the whole thing into the dirt. By where the remote crew goes I gotta figure they can burrow out 200 to 300 feet.
I have no idea how they manage to steer the far end. The road curves and goes uphill ahead! I noticed that they have a digital scanner box that must let them scope out where the bit end is, but how they can turn it is beyond me. At junctions they bring the bit end to the surface. I don't see any sign that the guy in the ram is driving it.
At the junction they attach the conduit and/or fiber to the far end and the machine pulls it back one pipe length at a time like fishing conduit. I guess they make a trench between two junctions. Come to think of it they must have to splice at each meet up point because they pull back to the previous - They don't pull in the direction they travel.
Wild. No wonder fiber runs are expensive but I guess it would be worse if they really had to dig a trench the whole length.
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