Subj : barbed wire telephony
To   : Oli
From : hyjinx
Date : Fri Jun 03 2022 19:51:18

 Ol> An article about DIY rural telephone system, partially using barbed wire a
 Ol> cable. I wonder if there ever was a BBS than ran over barbed wire ;)
 Ol> 
 Ol> "Before Ma Bell came to town, and long before DSL, it was barbed wire, of 
 Ol> things, that brought rural communities together. A Sears telephone hooked 
 Ol> barbed wire - miles of which were already conveniently strung along fences
 Ol> connected far-flung ranches in the recently settled American west. Thus an
 Ol> ingenious and unregulated telephone system sprung up a hundred years ago.
 Ol> 

I mean, that's awesome and all, but if the phone system in USA is anything
like the UK phone system, then standard volage is +50volts and ringer is
100V, so you wouldn't want to be touching it when a call was being
established! But yes, great ingenuity is often spurned out of necessity. It
was for this very reason that I used to use a 'cantenna' for my early
internet access in Edinburgh. I set up a dipole antenna with a pringles can
and got reasonably good (say 128k in 1999/2000) bandwidth, stealing it
courtesy of some rebels at Edinburgh University. This was in the days that
even achieving 56K V90 was pretty much impossible in most exchanges in the
area.

Cheers,
Al


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube)
alsgeeklab.com

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Linux/64)
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