Most of the wiring of my main Econet is underneath my desk, right up against the wall, so I can't very easily take a picture. Instead, this picture shows the front of under my desk, piled up with all manner of things including disc storage boxes. These make a handy resting place for my Econet FLAT Box, which I plugged into the expanded Econet whilst I was testing it. I'm going to keep it there, I think, because I quite like red and green lights flashing whilst I'm doing Econetty things.

Yes, yes, all right, before you start ringing up Points of View, I did mean red lights constantly on - 'cos that's the clock signal which is being transmitted all the time - and green lights flashing intermittently - 'cos they are the data lines which only illuminate when data is being sent or received.

Behind the FLAT Box is the SJ socket box at the upstairs end of the expansion cable. In one socket is plugged the cable to the FLAT Box which can be seen here, for monitoring purposes. (The SJ terminator also shown here, I should say, is nothing to do with anything, it's just a spare one which I store for safe keeping by plugging into a socket on my FLAT Box).

Into the other socket is another Econet cable which plugs into the end T-piece of my upstairs Econet wiring. Before the expansion, the end T-piece had an SJ terminator plugged into it, which has now been moved to the socket box downstairs next to the MDFS.

I won't kid you - I was anticipating oodles of problems with this Econet expansion. To start with, I was pretty convinced that I was going to need Econet Bridges joining the two separate sections of cabling together. I also thought that connecting the two sections together using an Econet lead plugged between a socket box and a T-piece would send things awry.

As it turned out, neither of these issues arose, and it all seemed to run pretty smoothly. I did encounter a couple of minor problems which I managed to resolve without too much difficulty.

The first problem was that I was using (unwittingly) a cheap and flimsy throwaway IDC crimp tool which was blunt after a couple of jabs. When nothing seemed to work after I had completed the wiring, it took me a while to realise that the crimp tool was so useless that it hadn't even pushed the wires on the blades sufficiently to pierce the insulation - so there wasn't any contact at all! As soon as I'd noticed this, I could rectify it.

The second problem was one of clock speed, and wasn't unexpected. Once the wiring was all OK, I found that I was still getting communication problems on the network and Net error and Not listening errors. The solution was to slow down the clock, by quite a bit, after which my Christmas 2011 Expanded Econet began to work like a charm!

Click here to return to Expanding the Econet