Arlyn S. Powell, Jr.
Group Editorial Director
arlynp@pennwell.com
How many ways are there to fish a wall? A lot--and we`ve covered many of them in the pages of Cabling Installation & Maintenance, mostly in our Cabling Installer Tips` section.
Fishing techniques are important, but they form only a very small part of what cabling installers do in the average day. In addition to pulling cable, typical installers may terminate fiber-optic, twisted-pair, or coaxial connectors. They may test cable runs, document the results, troubleshoot the failures, and perform repairs on the spot.
Cabling installers must be concerned with safety issues, reading and interpreting floor plans, and downloading and formatting test results into a legible report. There are also many business issues that impact installers: dealing with clients, the appearance and behavior of crews at an occupied jobsite, and interpreting and responding to requests for proposals.
The point is that the job of cabling installers, whether working for a contractor or employed directly by a business or organization, is varied, highly technical, and rapidly changing.
We at Cabling Installation & Maintenance would like our Cabling Installer Tips section to better reflect the variety of tasks performed in the cabling industry. Quite frankly, we feel we`ve gotten in a rut. We`re publishing too many fishing tips and not enough on other topics--and that`s where you come in. We need a wider range of Cabling Installer Tip ideas and submissions from you, our readers.
We already offer you $50 for each Cabling Installer Tip published, but we`d like to sweeten the pot a little to see if we can get more--and better--submissions. We will continue to pay the $50 bounty for each tip published, but we will also automatically enter all published submissions into a year-long contest with a grand prize of a brand-new, up-to-date local area network cable tester. A panel of cabling installers will select the winner each year from all Cabling Installer Tips published in the January through December issues of the magazine. The grand-prize winner will be announced in our Industry Spotlight news section early the following year.
So instead of goin` fishin` this summer, think up some good Cabling Installer Tip ideas and send them to us.
