Component Descriptions

[Brianc]

"Jack field" I'm sure I've seen but that would be old technology now.

Not in the Broadcast industry, Alan, although they are dying out now. They were used both in vision and sound circuits to enable fault finding and re-routing signals required by equipment failure.
The largest assembly of jackfields I was ever involved in was the first installation in the ITN building in Gray's Inn Road, London. We installed 2 off 132 x 132 component analog vision matrices with all i/ps and o/ps through MUSA type jackfields (the MUSA is a connector designed especially for patching high frequency circuits in an aerial array that could be steered by altering the phasing of certain elements of the array using a MUSA patch panel - a very British connector!). As it was an analog component system, each 132 x 132 matrix had three levels giving a total of 1,584 circuits, each wired via a vision jackfied. The jackfield occupied more than 3 racks of real estate (132U).