I suppose I just came home from work that particular night and decided to add the MDFS in its present location to my main Econet. The first challenge was finding enough cable to run from the MDFS to my main Econet wiring upstairs.

I measured out a couple of plausible looking lengths of Cat 5 cable, but neither was long enough, and I didn't fancy a join in the middle. I was going to connect an RJ45 face plate at each end of the length of cable and use a lead with an Econet DIN plug at one end and an RJ45 plug at the other end to connect the extension cable to the MDFS at the downstairs end and to my main network at the upstairs end.

Ultimately the lack of suitably long Cat 5 cable, plus a bit of an attack of Acorn purity, led me to abandon this idea and do things properly. Well, BeebMaster properly at any rate.

The other major bit of unfinished Econet business at BeebMaster Towers is a proper re-wire of my main Econet. You see, it's been held together with Econet leads and T-pieces since Easter 2005, when I ripped out all the existing wiring and socket boxes to re-do it all. Naturally, I couldn't go through life without an Econet, so I cobbled it all back together with T-pieces as a temporary measure till the new wiring was ready.

That was 2005 - it's still like that today! I did try to wire all the socket boxes back together, and I was even planning to have them screw-mounted on the walls and everything, but I just couldn't get the network going with my new wiring. At the time, I didn't have things like FLAT boxes, friends who know about cabling or much common sense, so it hasn't happened yet!

What's all that got to do with Christmas 2011? Well, it meant that I had a stock of unassigned socket boxes lying about somewhere which I could use in my Econet expansion. I dug out a couple of SJ Research boxes and my reel of black Econet cable and set to work.

After I had run the cable from the MDFS, up the stairs and far along enough to reach the existing wiring, I set about connecting up an SJ socket box to each end of the new cable. This picture shows the downstairs end, which is usually shoved behind the MDFS. There is a terminator plug in the right-hand socket - told you I was doing it properly! - and an Econet lead to the MDFS main unit in the left-hand socket.

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