sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services T1's, CSU's and DSU's Westel 3117 Backpowering T1 repeater card

I just found this site so this is my first post. The name is in no way a boast of intelligence just a reflection of some of the equipment I see all day. Any of you seasoned T1 guys have experience with the Westel 3117 unit used when a T1 repeater route has too many repeaters for the office to repeater to power all of them? A repeater somewhere midpoint in the repeater route is placed in loopback and then the office repeater provides the span power to one half of the circuit and this Westel unit provides the same from the opposite direction?

Never used the 3117. When I did that sort of work we used a Wescom 3192 in the middle of the run for T-1s (For T-3s we used an ADC product).

Westel is/was a quality manufacturer.

Sam

I don’t know that, that is really the intended use for the 3117-xx TER… Although it may work I’ve never know of one being used like that.

What it’s intended app is (or really should say was as it’s pretty ol’ school stuff now) is for T1’s hitting larger customer premise that may be served by fiber and/or Ds3 MUX’es…

If say a 3/1 MUX from the Telco is located in one building on a campus… but the end-user/customer’s CSU is located in an adjacent building and that’s where they would like the NID located. If that length is far enough that it’s going to require a conventional T1 repeater a 3117-xx can be used to interface campus cabling AND provide span power to a repeater and/or CSU.

If you’d like the entire practice on it shoot me you’re e-mail address and I’ll forward a copy to you in PDF form

The more I think about how you described it Jack, the more sure it's NOT going to be used like that... Putting a repeater in loopback within the span is going to also loopback the dsx1 signal. Meaning no customer data will pass.

Yeah, your right about it being pretty old stuff. But, they are is still being used to drive T1's to few very remote locations in some of my turf. Not many techs around anymore that are real experts on them now, so I'm getting alot of OJT along with some of my technicians on them now, because they seem to be fairly problematic.

CnGRacin your right I wasn't clear in my post. I speaking about the old apperatus case repeater runs. The repeaters used in them have an option setting for the line power which allows it to pass the 120V down the route to power the next repeater or loop, which loops the line power only at that repeater so that you don't overload the office repeater. The 60ma signal which contains your data still passes thru the repeater on to the next repeater in the route. It isn't a signal loopback it only stops the line power from passing that repeater from either direction. The signal path is not effected. This is a set up used with you have a very long loop, like >60kft. Typically your first repeater out of the office will be 3kft and 6kft for each one after that. After you get to about 10 repeaters the office repeater can't drive another one. There is no externally powered repeaters in this route except for the office repeater and the end repeater. The 15-20 repeaters between them are completely line powered by the end devices.