Cutaway of a street at night: a lighting column, terraced houses, and a buried cable glowing where a signal has been applied

Underground Intelligence Bureau

Everything Sygma Knows About Not Hitting It

Short courses, the videos and the method — and Scout, who has read all of it and answers in your own words, with the clip it came from.

The Bureau holds everything Sygma has written or filmed about locating buried services. Most of it is one video or one page. When a subject is worth walking through, a Mini Quick Course does it in a few steps with the videos built in. Everything is filed against 31 subjects, so it stays findable as it grows.

things to watch and read: 14things to watch and read
subjects, in six groups: 31subjects, in six groups
handbook chapters mapped: 31handbook chapters mapped

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Cutaway of a street at night: a lit column on the pavement, terraced houses behind, and a buried cable glowing orange where a signal has been applied

Mini Quick Course

Street Lighting

One Column Can Give You the Whole Street

Connect at the lighting first and, on a tee'd off system, the signal runs the LV main and the services with it. Do the houses one at a time and you can spend twenty minutes getting what one connection would have handed you.

1Why we start here1 min
2The two ways it is wired2 min
3Watch: the theory8:38
4Getting a signal on the column2 min
5Watch: on site4:05
6Check yourself6 questions

Start the course6 steps · ~15 min

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Four Behaviours That Can Cause Cable Strikes on Site

Most strikes trace back to four things people do — or skip — during the pre-excavation survey. Knowing what causes them is the first step to preventing one.

The Genny First Approach, In Practice

The method walked through on real ground: where the signal goes when you connect first, and what you miss when you do not.

Why You Connect the Genny First

Passive detection alone is not enough to find buried services. The Genny-first method, and why it changes what a survey is actually capable of finding.

Ask Scout

It Has Read Every Word in Here

Scout goes ahead and reports back. Every answer points at the clip and the timestamp it came from, so you can watch the bit that matters rather than take its word.

Ask a question

On a concrete column I can’t get a connection. What now?

Wrap the lead around the column and use a capacitance technique — you are coupling the signal on rather than connecting to it. The thing that catches people out: there is no tone change from the Genny when you do this, so don’t stand there waiting for one to tell you it worked.

Direct Connection: Street Lighting, LV and Telecoms, from 1:47