The monofilament fishing line is a truly novel idea.  It
is clear so a few feet should pass a signal all right.
What a variation on the old mechanical telephone made from two
cups and a piece of fishing line!

        To me, the big fiscal stumbling block is not the fiber as
much as the connectors that one has to use to properly terminate
a piece of fiber.

        The guys that do fiber here at the university where I
work use $20,000 fusion splicers and each connector that feeds in
to a router or patch panel costs several Dollars.

        What we need is some kind of clear goo with the same
index of refraction as the fiber that would allow one to cut the
fiber with a pocket knife or pair of wire cutters and still have
it work correctly.

        This discussion also reminds me of my days in the
eighties as an audio visual service technician.  I once
discovered that film carries a tiny trace of the projection
lamp's light within the clear backing material.  It's known by
many technicians that you can make a lot of noise by putting your
hand in front of the projection lens and reflecting the light
which is modulated by the shutter back towards the machine.  If
you have the covers off the sound optics, some of that light will
get to the photo cell and you hear a 72-HZ square-wave buzz in
the speaker.

        I once discovered that I could hear a tiny bit of that
buzz if there was film in the projector and no exciter lamp.  If
one ran the projector with no film, the faint buzz was gone.
This says to me that a little light was bouncing around between
the  front and back surfaces of the film, itself and causing the
film to appear to glow slightly as it passed over the photo cell.

        I also once held a scrap of fiber in such a way as to
catch some of the projection lamp light while I held the other
end approximately where the exciter bulb went.  You could hear
faint sound if you got everything just right.  The other folks in
our shop thought I was kind of crazy.  Hey! One of my favorite
questions about technology is, What else can you do with it?

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group

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