[squarefoot]

Steel is bad as an electrical conductor as its much higher than copper internal resistance would waste a lot of power. I don't know if the military still use wired field telephones, but in case they do, the field phone wire is excellent. It won't sustain lots of current, but if you're OK with a few amps, then that cable is sturdy, water and oil resistant and it has both copper and steel core, the former working as good electrical conductors and the latter making it extremely hard to break. It's also very good for building low cost emergency long wire antennas, dipoles, etc.

[sa46]

Around 2014 or so, we (light infantry) had field telephones on the books, but we only used them once for a field exercise to practice assuming all modern tech was down.

[H8crilA]

WW2 stories of diversions to enemy communications: put small needles through the cable. At first you'd think you just have to cut the cable, but that actually makes it very easy to find and fix the problem. Small needles that short the wires are very difficult to locate. Unless you have a fast device that measures return latency on the shorted circuit, but that wasn't available in the 1940s.

[tialaramex]

However "a fast device that measures return latency on the shorted circuit" is presumably very cheap today.

20+ years ago, rewiring buildings for 1000baseT the Cisco switches (3650s maybe? 3750s? I know they had IPv6 multicast acceleration in the switch fabric because that's why we had them) would do this for any circuit on command, OK, 18 metres from here there's a fault, pace, pace, pace, I reckon it'll be up on this cable tray... yup, some fool tried to "repair" a broken Cat5 cable, we'll just rip it out, meanwhile patch to a different circuit.

[jmole]

Time Domain Reflectometry - https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/how...

[sandos]

I believe I even had a BIOS in a PC that did this in some way....

Actually, I think it wasn't detecting faults but rather the length of cable connected.

[cjbgkagh]

You can use binary search to find the pin. Unless two or more pins are used.

[monocasa]

At that point it's easier just to run new line.

[cjbgkagh]

But you don’t know that when you start. You could assume it and never try to repaid and always replace but in WWII there were not as many options.

[bradknowles]

It's called a Time Domain Reflectometer. They're pretty cheap. For RG-58 style coax, you can get hand-held VeEX CX41 units for a few hundred dollars. I'm sure that TDRs for other types of cables shouldn't be too much more expensive.

[jutrewag]

Perfect time to use a pin nailer.

[tonyarkles]

Customers used to do this unintentionally with staples, and my boss was too cheap to buy a TDR tester for a long time

[UncleEntity]

We used field phones all the time when I was in light infantry (82nd Airborne). Pretty much any time we were in a fixed position out would come the commo wire so as to not give our position away.

They even went as far as having us string wire out to our ambush sites when we were on the Iraqi border during the first gulf war and reel it back up when we came in. Zero radio signals out there because they didn’t want them to know that a whole division plus French armor was there.

Modern tech is good and all unless you have some dumb Joe that keeps erasing the codes out of the radio by turning on the truck without putting it on standby or something…never quite figured that one out.

[sa46]

All the way! I was 1-505 PIR.

> dumb Joe that keeps erasing the codes out of the radio by turning on the truck without putting it on standby

Oh man, I have nightmares about comms. Juggling frequencies while traversing areas of operation, trying to get satcom working in mountainous terrain with jammers, and depending on the finicky windows-tablet encryption device, was not a fun time.

[noduerme]

From the fact that the writer said his concrete house was not meant to be habitable without power, I suspect he means to run an air conditioner.

[shubb]

I guess you could use a lot of parallel cables...

[noduerme]

if there's water, a single line could probably run a swamper.

[ars]

It's not hot in Ukraine at all - it's actually quite cold right now.

[noduerme]

The poster is not in Ukraine, he's in Sudan. It's hot there.

[ars]

Ooops. Too many wars at a time right now.

And yikes, it's really really hot in Sudan!

[Nemo_bis]

Indeed. Several dozens wars are ongoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...