Building an electrical cable tester?

Question

I'm building an electrical cable tester that should identify the type of cable and caters for ALL electrical cables. I would like to know what are the various parameters that i should test for and what are the safety issues involed with such an instrument (besides the obvious high voltage)

Answer 1

Identifying cables be test results is extremely difficult if not impossible. Identifying them visually would be much easier. ALL electrical cables is also not going to happen. Just listing every type would fill more than one book. If you need to ask what parameters to test, I seriously doubt you are anywhere near ready to built a useful tester for one type of cable.

Answer 2

If you had a table or cheat sheet which tells you the capicitance and resistance for every type of cable than you could probably build one to find the resistance(ohms), capicitance, etc, and used that to identify the type of cable.But, the problem with that is resistance will vary based on length as well as diameter size.

A Cable tester or identifier to get you in the ball park would work, but it would not be 100% reliable.

Answer 3

That's a big task since there's such a huge variety. For some cables impedance and others finding a fault (short or open) would be desirable. Check out some of the offering from Fluke Networks and companies like them. Hey, there might be a niche market out there. Good Luck!

Answer 4

This is a major task. If I were you I would decide upon a small group of cables to test and then decide upon a small number of parameters to measure.

Testing cables is one thing, identiying them from test results quite another. You will find the identification near impossible to achieve.

Answer 5

Hi. If you plan to measure things like velocity factor (how fast an RF signal goes through) you'll need to measure resistance, capacitance, impedance, etc.