Target Comms Rewire in California

This customer was interested in having their daisy chained targets separated to be controlled individually. To do this, we had to run a single cat5e cable from each controlling PLC to a switch for the router to communicate with. There are 32 targets on this range, that is a lot of targets but we accomplished this mission by finding a good place to mount an enormous 48 port switch to the knee wall at one end of the range and then pull 32 individual cables all the way across from one side to the other.

We first removed every cover over the race and at every target to gain access to the place where the cat5e we pulled would live. Once every cover was off, we terminated the cables inside the corresponding control box and then pulled the full length of cable to the other end.

Along the way from the shooters right side of the range to the left we stopped at every control box to duplicate this effort until we had 32 total connected cat5e cables. We installed the switch on the shooters furthest left side of the knee wall using some shallow channel.

We had to drill enough holes for enough conduit to accommodate the fresh cable. Once it was all pulled and terminated at both ends it was time to fire up the range and check the targets. There were a few problems, like this cable (picture below) that was chewed in half by mice and some PLC problems but we were able to get everything up and running with very few exceptions due to hardware issues.

After everything was tested and tuned we cleaned up and walked the range with the customer to identify some issues to look out for in the future and bid them farewell. Job well done.