“In Brief” (page 5 transcript)
Copper cables win award
THE ADF recently won a prestigious Golden Link Award for Outstanding Collaborations between Defence and industry for portable filed communication product that uses copper cable in place of fibre optic.
The award was presented at Technet 2002 in
DCI developed the copper cable (sic - copper cable transmission equipment ‘P3’) in close collaboration with RASigs members during the past three years.
Maj Thomas said the fibre optic cable, Kevlar-armoured especially for Defence applications, was expensive and broke when caught up in the track link of tanks or severed by forklifts.
During Exercise Tandem Thrust, fibre cables were eaten by cows and bandicoots, effectively making expensive communications infrastructure useless.
Copper cable was cheaper and easier to install, retrieve and fix and was impregnated with anit-vermin chemicals making it unappetising to four legged animal subversives.
The new product version was released in November 2001 with the first four systems delivered to the ADF School of Signals, 145 Sig Sqn and 7CSSB have ordered several systems for deployment on several forthcoming exercises.
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