Fun time at the office the other day

[Red Squirrel]

I work at a NOC, we monitor telecommunications across multiple separate regions.  Came to work on night shift after being off for 2 weeks, and 15 minutes before I showed up, one of the main central offices got hit by lightening.  It blew up the GPS antenna and clock so everything was going out of sync.  It also blew tons of other equipment including lot of DMS cards etc (for telephony switching).  Basically like 60kish people had no dial tone, and long distance was very sketchy due to trunks going out of sync on and off.  Even where I was since LD goes through that CO's toll switch.  The fibre optic network was lit up like a Christmas tree as well.  The clock is suppose to keep sync if the GPS goes out, but the clock itself got damaged too.   I think Dave may have actually done a teardown of something similar if I recall... this one is a Symetricom, there's a A side and B side. Would be interesting to do a teardown of the one that got hit by lightening.   I don't know all the details but someone did meantion there was even equipment that was on fire with flames shooting out.  Not sure if it was that or something else.

They had to rush spare cards and an antenna  from the CO I was at, so I went around the building taking pictures of our clock and other equipment so they can confirm model # before they start digging for spare cards. 

Apparently the main ground for the building vaporized in that process too.   One of the techs was in the telephony switching room when it hit, he said one of the frames light right up in a bright flash.  Must be quite something to witness that.

A coworker who ironicly was the one on shift for that, actually was in our CO when it got hit by lightening many years back before I started.  He said he actually felt his hair rise and felt all staticy, then the lights started to dim, then he heard a huge bang. Said it sounded like a truck hitting the building. He ran outside to check it out, and the GPS antenna was in the street, on fire.   Those GPS antennas sure seem to attract lightning. 

[Dave Atom]

Those GPS antennas sure seem to attract lightning. 

Everyone knows that GPS antennas have special circuits in them to attract the gps signals, they don't just absorb radiated signals, they actually 'suck' the signal in, that's why they are so expensive and often hit by  lightning, that's why you have to turn your gps units off in a storm.

[StuUK]

Everyone knows that GPS antennas have special circuits in them to attract the gps signals,

I didn't but consider myself educated now