I'm looking at designing a small standalone unit which will allow me to emulate faults in an ethernet cable.
I could do this with standard '351' type relays but was wondering if there's a suitable electronic solution, a switch IC or solid state relay that would be more elegant than a load of clicking relays.
Don't knock the humble relay :-)
For a one-off design they will save you a heap of time and you won't have to worry about annoying problems often associated with fully solid-state designs.
Also, I assume you are talking Ethernet 10BaseT or upwards using Cat5 (or better) twisted pair cable? (the original Ethernet was 10Base2 using coaxial cable but this is fairly rare these days).
Kenny,
Absolutely simulate line faults with a relay, contactors, etc a mechanical physical short. The electric "relays" and the like are not at all the same as a fault between the wires, contacts and terminals in a real -world communications test set. Please use the relays :-
Marc
PS if you need help sizing and procuring relays let me know, as I have significant expericne in design and may have the perfect relay in stock as well.
That was 'thinwire'; the original was 'thickwire', a double-shielded coax cable with insulation-piercing connector schemes, 10Base5.
Both thickwire, and the MAU connector, which went to equally thick multiple-twisted-pair cable, were 'original' Ethernet wiring.
Yep, you are quite right. I vaguely remember installing a "thickwire" ethernet LAN for a SUN system running Daisy CAD way back in the late
80's. It was a bugger running that heavy and stiff coax and trying to arrange for the correct AUI connector point to be as close to the required workstation drop-off point as possible. You couldn't position those things just anywhere on the cable, they had to be on the marked points.
I suppose it depends on whether you are emulating faults on a 10 MB/s system or a gigabit Ethernet. The parasitics introduced by the solid state components may have little effect on the former but appear as their own kind of fault on the latter.
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