Thor?? God of Thunder?? F#$% YOU!!

[sixums]

ditto, think of how happy T Boone Pickens and Al Gore would be if we could just harness that gigawatt of power...

T BOONE PICKENS.

I cannot be the only person that thinks his name is absolutely hilarious. My boyfriend and I saw his commercial and had a nice long laugh. Of course, we're incredibly immature like that.

Back on topic..... you poor thing. I am so sorry you had to do that. I would have never survived. For that, you get

[Crazeyal]

How the hell do you stay awake?!

Used to have QUITE a few jobs that required you to stay awake or .. y'know..

DIE!!!

(U.S.M.C. and OTR trucker... Fall asleep in either of those and it's pretty much yer ass..)

[Der Cute]

Al-
Were the fiber optic cables in steel conduit or some kind of metal housing?

The way you described it makes me think of a rooftop with all the antennae and gadgets on top of it with some kind of lightning rod on there. And the casing for the fiber optics.

Or were the fibers underground and had some kind of steel that went to the surface?

I'm trying to think how the lightning would hit ground and fry the fibers...

[Crazeyal]

The Fibers only go to the translator unit. The readers need twisted pair into the power and logic circut, and both are run seperately with surge protection. Problem is, the protection usually lasts one hit, and I never know if the reader board takes a hit ANYWAY. If the surge supressor dies, there's about a 50/50 chance that it dies in such a way as to start sending spikes into the logic circut when power is sent through it again.

So the reader board dies AND the replacement dies.

Have I mentioned I HATE this setup??

There really doesn't seem to be much else to do, though. I have to travel out and reset power about twice a week, and I lose a board about 25 - 50 % of the time. Without the surge supression it's more like 75%.

Have I mentioned the reader boards are about $800??

To specifically answer your question, there is an inbound proximity reader and an outbound. Each gets 4 copper wires ( positive power, neg power, positive logic, neg logic) and the outbound reader shares the feed with the inbound reader (you'd be talking an additional $10,000 for a seperate fiber feed for each side at the minimum!)

The lightning apparently hit the box, traveled throught the reader board, and out to ground through the logic circut copper wires. Near as I can figure.