Date   : Mon, 29 Mar 2004 07:56:04 +0100
From   : Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>
Subject: Re: MDFS incomplete startup

In article <10403290022.ZM1689@...>, Pete
Turnbull <pete@...> writes

>All the telephone cable I've seen, except of course flat connection
>cord, is twisted, and indeed the BT spec requires it to have a twist
>rate not less than a certain amount.  Even common alarm cable (which is
>often stranded, telephone cable is not) has some twist.

It'd be interesting to know what other types of cable people used in
Econet installations, and what their experiences were.  When I worked
for an Acorn dealer, we stuck to the Acorn-recommended cable when doing
Econet installations at customer sites, but this was a pig to strip and
install in the socket boxes (particularly if you followed the guidance
not to cut the cable.)

I installed a ~50m Econet using Cat5 UTP in the office using the
standard clock rate of 200kHz - the network had a mixture of machines on
it - this was *much* easier to install and worked fine.  I did carry out
some limited testing of signals using an oscilloscope at one end of the
cable with a machine transmitting at the far end, and running NetMon to
watch for network errors.  As far as I remember, there were no problems.