Comm fixes phone service on Bitburg Annex

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Nathanael Callon
  • 52nd Fighter Wing Public Affairs
SPANGDAHLEM AIR BASE, Germany --  Cable technicians from the 52nd Communications Squadron repaired an optical fiber line outside Bitburg Annex Aug. 11.

Someone had inadvertently cut the line about two kilometers from the annex, and the damage knocked out all the military telephone lines Aug. 9. The outage prevented normal operations for agencies located there, since customers could not reach their offices.

The DSN cable connected the old Bitburg Air Base with the annex, and the cut was discovered the morning of Aug. 10.

"We first had to figure out where the cut happened," said Gary Zeimens, 52nd CS cable technician. "Once we found the problem, we had to figure out if we had the rights to dig and repair the cable, since the land doesn't belong to the base."

Communications Airmen coordinated with the landowner, and the repair began the next morning. At the scene of the line break, Zeimens worked with local contractors to dig up the line, clean the broken wires and splice the two broken lines together.

Back at the annex, technicians worked to troubleshoot the cables and expand Bitburg's telephone capabilities.

"When we got in here to start troubleshooting, we noticed that some of the optical fiber cables were in bad shape," said Tech. Sgt. Benjamin Reid, 52nd CS cable maintenance NCO in charge. "While we were waiting for the techs on the other end, we made the connections here better."

Because the fibers used are made of pure glass and have a core that carries light which is translated into data by a processor, the Airmen must be very delicate and precise when handling them.

The fibers used to repair the line have a diameter of 125 microns, about the equivalent of a human hair.

"The core of the optical fiber, which actually carries the light transmissions, has a diameter of only nine microns," Reid added. "Some people get intimidated when dealing with the amount of wires and the technical detail involved, but we know how to get the job done."