Connecting the world one wire at a time

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Jon Hanson
  • 407th Air Expeditionary Group Public Affairs
ALI BASE, Iraq (AFPN) --  They maintain miles of cable and wire so everyone can communicate here and to the world. The job has them working above and below ground, while fighting all the elements of being in a desert climate.

This responsibility lies with the 407th Expeditionary Communications Squadron’s base information infrastructure shop.

Working with telephones and copper, fiber-optic and local-area-network cables for the Air Force portion of Ali Base means this nine-person shop stays busy.

The shop is a mix of maintenance technicians who work with telephones, cable, computer network switching, cryptography and computer communications. Having different job specialties is good but also meant more work at the beginning of their rotation during team development.

“A lot of our workcenter are not doing the job they were trained to do,” said Tech. Sgt. Dan Dvorak, noncommissioned officer in charge of the shop. “We had to do a lot of training right off the bat to get things running smoothly.”

The shop has tackled several major projects.

One of the ongoing projects involves moving the main distribution frame which services all base telephone, local area network and special circuits from one building to a tactical shelter. The new shelter is a dust-free environment to improve the life of the fiber and copper cables.

“This entails moving 350 strands of fiber and 3,500 pairs of copper cables,” Sergeant Dvorak said, who is deployed here from Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. “(Moving the main distribution frame) has never been done before and is a major undertaking for our workcenter.

“It took us 11 days with five people to move the 350 strands of fiber,” Sergeant Dvorak said. “The copper is going on right now. It (took) four people three days to splice 500 pairs of copper. The 3,500 pairs of copper have to be spliced twice to install the section of cable we need to reach the new manholes.”

To splice, a technician must place 25 different colored wires from “side A” into color-coded slots on a 710-splice machine. The machine trims the ends of the wires on one side. Then an additional 25 wires from “side B" are spliced and merged with “side A.” This takes a long time and is done in humid, water-filled manholes.

“The hardest thing I have done here would have to be all the cable splicing,” said Staff Sgt. David Reyes, who is deployed here from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. “Just splicing 600 cable pairs together has been very tedious and time-consuming. By the end of (each) day I am completely drained mentally and physically.”

One of the limiting factors they have had to overcome was the shape of manholes. Many of them were collapsed so all of the wiring had to be moved to new manholes. Others were just crowded with cables.

“Manhole number one was a mess with cables everywhere,” said Staff Sgt. Lee Doolen, who is also deployed here from Tinker AFB. “So now we are routing wires to the tactical shelter through our two new manholes. Once we get all the wires routed the right way, we can start using manhole one again."

Another undertaking entailed moving approximately 70 telephones and 100 secure and unsecure network connections for a half dozen offices.

“I think that the job is harder here,” said Senior Airman Melissa Curry, deployed from the Tinker AFB.  "I’ve learned so much by coming here, such as the art of pulling cable, fusion splicing fiber optic cable together and how the telephone network operates on a basewide scale.”