During the DAS deployment phase, it's not unusual for cable pullers to leave some slack at the points where connectors will be installed. They do that with the thinking that having a little slack is much, much better than coming short on cable run at the point of, say, splitters or couplers. I had been in a project recently where the crew chief picked up a few crew from the local Union Hall to pull cables, and to make things simple and straightforward asked them to leave 5 ft slack at every connector point. This ended up costing us 15 ft of wasted cable per 2-way splitter or directional coupler (3 ports, 5 ft per port, a total of 15 ft). Waste doubled because this was a MIMO system. This waste is in addition to the waste we usually get from reaching the end of the spool. So when the crew chief asked for additional cable, we started suspecting the scale of the design first. We got more puzzled when we found that design was done according to the right scale. It took us almost over a week before we could figure out the principal cause.
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| A slackin' Situation |
For this particular MIMO project, we had close to 376 antennas, 33 remotes, and 306 splitters/couplers. Just for the 5 ft slack at each connection point, the waste came out to be about 6,635 ft. From materials perspective, best thing to do is to connectorize as you go. In that case though, you may have to have crew who pulls cable and also knows how to put connectors on.
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