Many people believe that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it isn’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

When I first started as a Tier 1 field technician in the early 1960s, my test sets included a KS 8455 Volt/Ohmmeter, a Wheatstone bridge, a breakdown test set, a 76C tone generator, a 147B amplifier, a 20C cable locator and a butt set. Ninety-five percent of all cable troubles and trouble in the house could be identified, located, and repaired with those sets.

We were in the “if it touches, it talks” business. The customer wanted dial tone when he picked up the phone. When he called someone he expected that person to be on the other end of the circuit. After that he wanted to hear what the other person said without static or a hum on the line.

After fixing trouble on the circuit we would go to the customer’s phone, pick it up, dial the quiet line termination, and blow into the mouthpiece on the phone to make sure it was transmitting. The conclusion was: “Sounds good to me. See ya.”

But it wasn’t as simple once the touch pad telephone was introduced. Trouble-shooting changed forever. Because of poor circuit design such as missing or misplaced load coils, too much or too little end section, too much 26-gauge wire in the loop, or excessive bridged tap, many touch pad phones didn’t work.

Time for more equipment. To circumvent design problems and high power influence, every technician was issued a transmission test set. The field technician identified the root cause and transmission engineers identified the root cause and repairs were done.

Most of our telephone cables were pulp or paper insulated. Plastic insulated conductor (PIC) cables were in their infancy. No test equipment was designed for the new PIC cables, which made trouble-shooting difficult.

The Test Set Competition Begins
The first PIC resistance bridge was manufactured by the Delcon Corporation in the late 1960s but it was rendered useless if crossed battery was present on the cable pair. Dynatel introduced the 710A resistance bridge that was unaffected by battery -- and the competition was on. Delcon made the 4913 resistance bridge which had a digital display.

Delcon made the first open meter, but it was affected by other trouble on the cable pair. Dynatel made the 730 open meter that was unaffected by other trouble on the circuit.

To compete, Delcon made a combination open/split locator and forced Dynatel to build a 735 open/split meter even though 1 out of 10,000 cable troubles were a split cable pair -- but every technician and his brother had to have one.

Delcon made a low-frequency cable locator that was literally replaced by the Dynatel 500 high-frequency cable locator. Other companies jumped into the locate business; there are now more than 23 different brands of cable locators available today.

Don’t get me wrong -- competition is good for the industry and drives quality. But it also leads to unnecessary features. Take a look at your smart phone: Do you truly need and use all of the features? But they are there so each smart phone maker can boast a unique, definitive feature -- and hopefully charge more in the process. It’s the same with test sets. We have many sets available, most have unnecessary features and they cost more than they should, overwhelming the tool budget of the operating company so that many technicians are without test sets they need to do their job in a highly complex information technology world.

Let the Tech Drive the Need for Features
ADSL set the vendor market on fire. If one vendor came out with a feature that the competitor did not have, that competing vendor would have to add that feature and come up with a couple of new features. It didn’t matter if the field technician used the feature or not; it was a selling point, and because of this rampant one-upmanship the price of today’s multi-functional test sets is through the roof.

Despite all the big price tag sets, today’s average outside field technician can do an excellent job with a multi-functional test set with a quality digital multimeter. The set must have transmission testing capabilities; a resistance bridge; an open meter; a Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR); a high- and low-frequency spectrum analyzer; the ability to identify impulse noise; and a golden modem to show sync, achieved rate, maximum achievable rate, a display for errors, margin, attenuation, and capacity.

In my training classes field technicians show me countless features on their test sets that have little to do with their job, and they ask me what the feature is and whether there is a benefit of the feature to them when finding problems. Sadly the answer is often “Nope.”

The more experienced technician may need more features, but these features must be driven by what the field technician needs and not at the whim of a vendor marketing team. Vendors: Choose your features wisely, and make feature add-ons if needed -- that will keep the cost down and you won’t price yourself out of the
test set business.

Signing off
Thanks for reading. I’d like to know what sets you are using and what you like and don’t like about them. Email me at dmccarty@mccartyinc.com or call or text at 831.818.3930. Your input is important to me, this column, and your fellow technicians. And check out my TALK BACK online column and tell me what you think: http://www.ospmag.com/columnists/mccarty/talkback.