Phil Addison wrote:

In most cases there is no sender or receiver - both PABX and ethernet
are fully bidirectional with connection equally likely to be initiated
at each end.

Indeed; I should have kept to source and destination.

Even that is a bit nebulous...

No, RJ11 to RJ11. You can take advantage of the fact that the smaller
versions of the RJ45 (more correctly 8P8C (eight pole, eight contact)[1]
such as the RJ11, will plug into sockets with more ways and still
perform correctly.

Ahh I see. Does that mean you can't get short RJ11 to RJ11 patch leads?

Oddly enough I have not seen any... I am sure you must be able to buy
them. I just used ordinary RJ11 patch leads to start with (i.e. the type
you get with a ADSL modem), but that meant you had a clump of extra
cable to coil up etc each time. To keep the rats nest under control a
bit I ended up shortening them.

Could you make them up from scratch from a length of phone cable, after
all, you must have had to crimp 4 RJ11s per 3 leads, so having 2 on
already seems a marginal benefit.

Indeed you can. I just went with what I had to hand - however I did not
cover it in detail in the article since it was not that important to the
concepts.

If you could "look through" from front to back you would see each socket
is tracked to a krone strip, and they alternate side to side to make
space for the strip of 8 punch down terminals which is wide than the
physical 8 way connector:

1 3 5
###### ###### ###### - krone strips on the back - odd numbers
_______________________
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | - sockets on front

###### ###### ###### - krone strips on the back - even numbers
2 4 6

Aha, now I HAVE got it. The missing bit of know-how is that a krone
block is the same width as two RJ45 sockets so 2 krones one above the
other just fit in the space of the 2 RJ45s they serve. Just out of

In fact, this one:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...RJ45Module.jpg

shows that quite well - you can see the outline of the RJ45 socket
clearly beside the punch down block.

interest, what do you mean by 'tracked'? Is it on a pcb, a film wire or
actual catx cable? Whatever it is still has to meet the catx spec.

A PCB. Again like in the module in the piccie above. The patch panel
just having a long narrow PCB.

What other explanations / photos do you think would make it a bit clearer?
Ideally a photo of a patch panel from above showing the complete route
through from a patch (or other input) lead at the front to a loom lead
at the back, plus the bit above explainning that patching does not have
to, or doesn't usually, happen on the patch-panel itself .
ok, will see what I can do.

The diagram above explains it quite nicely, and feel free to use any of
the text of my interpretation.

I will get another photo at some point. Alas I have not got any more
patch panels on my stock shelf, so will either have to wait, or go
unscrew one of mine from the cabinet.

Thanks for the additional clarification, of an already excellent article
- its taken me from "what thef' is structured cabling all about?" to "I
think I've got it"!!
Now all we need do is get to the "where can a buy one" and the job is done!

;-)

Err... there's just the little matter of needing to move furniture, lift
carpets, floorboards everywhere!! I'll have to stick with wireless, and
maybe get some homeplugs, for the time being. But least I know what I'm
missing now!

;-))

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/