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kilofoot

In the United States, late 20ᵗʰ – early 21^st centuries, a unit of length, = 1000 feet = 304.8 meters. It is used in telecommunications to describe telephone line lengths, and in aeronautics and meteorology to describe altitudes. Symbol, kft, or more rarely Kft. The latter spelling seems to occur only in telecommunications documents, and in those mainly in contexts where the similarly misspelled symbol Kbps (kilobits per second) also occurs. (By SI usage rules, the “k” for kilo- should not be capitalized.)

The RAND style manual (pages 43-44) condemns the kilofoot on the grounds that it is a hybrid of two disparate systems of units, which is undeniable, but the objection sounds a lot like the nineteenth-century objections to various metric units because the root was Greek and the prefix Latin or vice versa. The fact is the kilofoot is a standard unit in certain fields.

examples

“When arranged in this way, the cable exhibits a nominal resistance of 0.067 ohms per kilofoot of phase.”

Duane Elms. HFC centralized powering: A unique approach. CED Magazine, April 1996.

“For example, under one set of input specifications the HCPM will specify a maximum distance of 18 kilofeet from any customer location to the corresponding cluster centroid, and a maximum analog copper distance of 12 kilofeet if 26 gauge copper is used.”

C. A. Bush, D. M. Kennet, J. Prisbrey, W. W. Sharkey [all from the FCC] and Vaikunth Gupta. The Hybrid Cost Proxy Model; Customer Location and Loop Design Modules. 15 December 1998.

“QBone Architecture (30 kilofoot view)”

Caption for diagram. Ben Teitelbaum, “VoIP & QoS: You Can't Always Get What You Want.” VoIP Workshop, Texas A&M Univ., 4 April 2002.

“The 3000-foot wind is from 195 degrees at 20 kts. This is plotte [sic] at the 3 kilofoot (kft) position on the wind scale at right in the diagram below.”

Tutorial on Plotting a Skew-T Diagram. Retrieved 24 September 2005.

“... or where customer loop length on ATM network is longer than 12 Kft, customer will be provisioned at 768 Kbps/128 Kbps service.”

Fine print in Verizon flyer, Sept. 2005. BR-SeptFU05-W.

“Loop tested good @ 8.56 kft.”

Letter dated 18 July 2002 from TDS Metrocom to Nancy Weber, Illinois Commerce Commission.

“GTE stated that BETRS customers and existing voice grade lengths in excess of 18 Kft require extensive modifications at exorbitant costs to achieve 14.4 Kbps functionality, and should be excluded entirely from the rule.”

Public Utility Commission of Texas, summary of public comments re Substantive Rules, Chapter 26.

“The average wind speed (mph) and average relative humidity (10, 20, 30 (brown) and 70, 80, 90 (green) percent) for 0 to 1 kft above ground level (agl), 1 to 2 kft (agl), 2 to 3 kft (agl), 3 to 4 kft (agl), 4 to 5 kft (agl) and 5 to 6 kft (agl).”

Key to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration diagram.

“Alt = 13.5 kft”

Data reported from AVIRIS Flight: f050221t01, JPL/NASA.