Tales from the Cube: Electric Fences Don't Make Good Phone Lines

This Tales from the Cube installment is a tale of an attempt to exploit the miles of electrified fencing on rural farms for telephone communications. It would be far cheaper to clip a special phone to the fence lines than to set new poles and string new lines for a relative few customers. It would have been easier to install a radio-based switching station for the remote farmers. 20 years later they finally have one - cellphones.

Posted January 2013

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...

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