DIY Commander patch cabling

17 Sep 2005

They’re a bit weird. Most telephone cable you can run straight through, but not Commander cabling. For whatever reason [read: establishment of a commercial monopoly enforced by tax-payer dollars through the ACA], their cables are different. Special. Not terribly complicated, but unnecessarily so.

They reversed it for no reason.

One end is the opposite of the other. You can see it in the picture above — note that both sides go black, red, green, yellow — but one side is the underside (note gold contacts) whilst the other is the top (note un-snapped-off[!] clip).

It’s not particulary hard, it just means you need to stay vaguely awake when crimping stuff. It also means that you do need to crimp stuff, and that off-the-shelf telephone cables won’t cut it. I’m pretty convinced that this means it’s not a normal telephony cable, and that the ACA can therefore go and shove their restrictions somewhere else. Or, alternatively, abandon them altogether, and let natural selection take its course. If people can get themselves killed whilst crimping signal cables, well…