Note: I find the Compco menu structure confusing. When I want to access a particular table, I simply position my cursor in the blue “Mysoft C/S” part of the navigator window and click once to bring up the following window:
Scan down through the left window of available tables and select the one you are interested in. Double click or hilite and click the ‘add’ button, then the ‘OK’ button to create a shortcut button to the desired table on your navigator menu so it looks like the following:
Finding the path of a known instrument:
Enter the UserI table and a browse window appears:
Type in the equipment number (phone number or 170- number in the case of special circuits). In compco phone numbers are represented in UserI as 7 digits plus 01. For example, 545-9645 is represented by the UserI 545964501. After entering the number click the “apply” button and the useri appears, hilited in the browse window. Now hit the return key to bring up the desired UserI record:
Click the recurring charge tab. You see a list of recurring charges. Hilite the DL1 record for digital equipment, the ALO record for analog equipment, or the SPEC record for Special circuits.
Click the ‘Cable Info’ tab and you are now at the following window:
Click the track button and you will see the following path:
All relevant information is available. The cables are in the green bars, phone closets and jack locations are in the yellow bars and the len is in the grey bar. If you have had “Capture EZ97” installed on your pc (see Jason Voshu if you need it) then you can print out this path.
Determining cable and pair range for a specific location.
Suppose you have a building in mind and you want to know the main feeder cable and pair range that feeds it. Simply go into the ‘Cable’ table. The blue browse window appears but the search criteria is cable, ( you don’t know which cable you want, that’s what your trying to find out.) so you need to click the black arrow to the right of the ‘order by’ window and select: Term dist point.
You do need to know the BET number. But you can usually guess it easily enough if you know the building number. Then simply add ‘-00-1’ and you will probably be correct. In the following example I have entered the BET for Memorial Hall.
Click apply , then return and the following cable record appears:
As you can see the MFC is A0101. What is the significance of the ‘-0975’ at the end of the cable id? That signifies the highest pair that feeds the Memorial BET. To determine the total pair count click the ‘Show Cable/Pair statistics’ button and the following info appears:
Now we see the first pair, last pair and number of active and inactive pairs.
Determining a specific pair status
Now that we have found the cable and pair range for the building we will be working in we will be interested in finding a specific pair.
Enter the ‘Pairs’ table and enter the desired cable in the browse window, click apply, return and the first pair record appears.
We can see that this pair is active as well as the cable and pair connected to it. If we select the Jump to selected cross connect we will then jump to the riser 1150012A, pair 1 record. We can continue to jump to the next cross connect all the way to the end of the path at the station cable record. But for now we are simply trying to find an available pair in Memorial hall. We can do this by clicking the right pointing red arrow icon (see above) until we find the first available pair. I clicked ahead from pair 776 to pair 779 to find the first available (inactive in Compco terms) pair.
There is a quicker way to scan through the pair records. In the first step where we opened the ‘pairs’ table and entered the cable in the browse window we saw the following:
You can see that pair 779 is the first available pair (status = ‘I’ for inactive) without ever leaving the browse menu. NOTE: in Compco I stands for inactive and A stands for Active in the Pair Status field.