Cable tester

Yes, lots of companies. Here's a chart of some of the still mostly-low-end units:

There are much fancier ones available, e.g.,

^tester&modifier=SEARCH&reqTitle=TITLE_VIASEARCHRESULT&newWindow=Y . (Techni-Tool has plenty more at >$1k too...)

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Thanks for the links..

My question is has anyone CREATED one.. not simply bought one from a store.

I would like to build my own. guess I should have been more specific =3D)

Cheers Steve

You can begin by telling us... what would you like it to do?

How about a poor mans TDR?

That would be good - in the mode of creature feep, a bnc connector would be nice with the TDR as well (got a 250 footer that's gone bad somewhere, but it's tie-wrapped to stuff here, in conduit there, and I can't find it by inspection - though I'm probably just going to yank it out as I already worked around it).

Mind you, I think the only "affordable" way to do TDR is if the poor man already has an oscilloscope, and can drag it to the cable with a pulse generator - but I'm willing to find out differently.

*** (not novel) Cable ID (rabbit and ferret) - two boxes, one has signal injection and the other can pick out the cable with that signal from the other N unlabeled cables stuffed into some dank nasty part of a building. Signal should not damage ethernet or phone devices if other end of cable is plugged in. *** (not novel) End-to-end check - the second box can also plug into the far end and make some sort of check on the cable with both ends far apart, as when installed. Ideally this would be adaptive (ie, if one side of a pair is broken, but some other wire goes through, the tester pairs up to find as many good wires as possible, down to the logical lower limit of 2 wires) *** (might be slightly novel, or I don't look at enough test equipment I can't afford)

Once end-to-end check passes (at least for a couple of pairs), do some end to end test patterns, ideally at various data rates, ideally including rates exceeding the nominal operating rates for the sake of peace of mind, or marginal link detection, or whatever you want to call it.

ie, for Ethernet, run tests at 10BaseT speed, and 12 and 15 (not that those exist) and 100 BaseT speed, and 120 and 150 (not that they exist), and 1000 BaseT, and 1200 and 1500 (not that they exist)

...and we've probably passed right out of affordable, poor man territory again.

*** For completeness, get a couple of surplus cell-phone vibrator things, and switch those on at some point in the testing (in both boxes, perhaps one at a time) to see if the connectors are flaky with motion.

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Now here's a question. I need to design a system to determine the characteristics of a cable, impedance, cross-talk, etc.. Buying one is not practical, since I am in Zimbabwe... Anyone got some good links to information? Useful advice?

Also consider some sort of crosstalk test between the various twisted pairs.

One of the most common errors in making up Cat5 cables is to mix up the various paired conductors. Continuity will check out OK, and perhaps even unidirectional data transmission. But the signals will be coupled into adjacent conductors to a higher degree.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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