How to trace and track wires using a cable tracker
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- Опубліковано 2 сер 2014
- Hi, this 'how to' video shows how to use a cable tracker tone and probe to trace and track various cables and wires.
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www.mrtelephone.co.uk - Наука та технологія
This is probably the best explanation of how and what a Wire Toner Tracker is. Best video on youtube on this tool.
Very nice demo. I like how you actually explained and zoom in on what cable you’re attaching the leads to. Most other videos don’t do that. Especially the coax. One lead go to the outer connector, the other lead go straight to the middle pin.
Thanks another post the guy wanted to test the device and take it apart.
Thanks for being so straightforward.
Thanks Vince that was very informative and clearly explained.
I did not know about the shorting out of the two cables as conformation, although it is so bloody obvious I should have.
So that is something I have learnt today.
Cheers.
Ben Sandham Cheers Ben!
The best tracer explanation on UA-cam
I finally get to see the Vince I have been listening to for over 50 videos. Not sure if this is the right tool for what I am doing. Thanks for posting video.
Superb demo sir.the most clear and concise,by far the best tutorial on youtube ,thanku.loads,stephen in the uk
Thanks for the suggestions you have shared here.
simple explanation. and so good and so useful. Thankyou
Very informative. I feel like I know everything about tracers now.
A very good and thorough demo, bro....cudos to your camera operator as well.
I didn't know the trick about shorting the wires to see if they're the correct pair. I would think that also indicates continuity, so integrity of both wires. Thanks for that!
Great video, easy,informative and well done
Thanks
Excellent video explanation. Well done.
Excellent explanation. Thanks a lot.
Thank you for this video, exactly what I was hoping to find in the slew of how-to videos
Nice to see its very informative video thank you for sharing
Cheers Vince love your vidz - you are a good presenter!
Seems simple enough. Thanks!
Nice explanation and video as usual and fully up to Vince's high standards of clarity and straightforwardness. However what is not so good is the device itself. The transmitter and receiver combination is weak and the range is very short. I know this from experience. If the cable you are trying to trace is behind a plasterboard partition, in brickwork or under a floor, the device is simply not sensitive enough to be able to show a signal. The range in free air is about 10 to 15cm. With any building material interposed, the range drops to about 2 or 3cm. Pity really as otherwise it would be a really good tool.
Thank you for this very informative review
Very helpful Thanks for sharing
Thanks for explanation. Very helpfull. What max range this tracker can measure? sorry for my bad english.
I purchased one of those tools and have not used it yet, but plan on using it on one of my automobiles, which I am having problems with.
Thank you so much for this video, I've learned something today!
great job with this vid bud.
Hope you can help me, i have traced a cat6 cable with a toner color coded per pairs and it is tuning ,but if we test the cat6 with a multimeter there's no continuity signal.
So if I'm checking only 1 wire I can just use the black ore red connector since tone is coming down both?
As an electrician I'm always moving phone lines and adding points been after something like this for ages but wasn't sure how it would help I regularly use a cheap handset just to test for dial tone but recently was dragged in to second fix a bungalow complex but previous sparky was clueless and I had to bell them out with my probe tester bit fiddly this is now on my shopping list
Ben Teasdale Excellent, thanks Ben.
Thanks, Sparky.
Do these have an audio out jack? I live near an FM radio tower and might end up picking up the station on one of these. If these have an audio out jack I could record what is heard.
when testing twisted pair data cable, you should use one core from a different colour... the reason they are twisted together is to stop outter noise/interference, so therefore you might not be able to pick up a tone..
Husqvarna
Hi vince we have a few extension phone boxes on the walls all of them we can uses but one has a nosie on it can i use a network tester to check if a wire is broken or is there something esle i could use thanks
brilliant thanks
I could use this to locate a break in a loom?
I have a zillion AV wires I my rack with RCA connectors. How do I attach this device to the RCA jack. I have tried everything and hear no tone when I touch the wire. I'm trying to understand the wiring configuration by tracing several of the wires. Thanks!
If the coax cable connectors are in place i.e. thin individual wires are not separated, is there a way to trace the cable ends with connectors ?
in some senders are a switch inside (on pcb) where u can choose the signaltone , like endless beep or an switching beebuu beebuu
so how do you find 1 wire - in this example you hooked up 2 wires - what if you needed to single out the solid blue in your test?
Very useful little Device. I bought one. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you
MY MATE VINCE< the common problem with cable trackers is the trace tone will JUMP/crosstalk because of the coupling of various wires being to close together. Also the cable trackers don't tell you if you have a BREAK in the wire or how long the wire length is. What can you use to find out how long the wire length is in the wall going through the front to the back of the house or up to the ceil down to underneath the house, what can you use to find this?
what gauge wire can you test it on? 10 gauge ?
Thanks Vince. Can use this instrument to locate electrical wires underground?!
No.
I know it's not the same thing but I was wondering can this device be used to find say a break in a wire you know like Where there is a crack in the wire that you cannot find visually
Can anyone tell me if it matters which way you put the f connectors on the back of a sky q box?
very useful video especially with the rip off prices BT charge if they claim the fault is due to their customers wiring
Hi Vince, I have nearly finished installing a Cat6 to my workshop. I am a little bit worried about signal degradation as I have come into my workshop with my 10mm cable and cat6 using the same hole. They then travel in parallel for about 140cm. The 10mm cable was an armoured type but I have removed the armour where it runs next to the cat6. The insulation is still quite thick though. -Can I use my tone generator to test for signal degradation? Will the tone become weaker if there is electrical interference? - If not what is the most inexpensive way of testing this? Cheers Will (PS great videos, I have found them really helpful since I am electrically trained but a complete novice with telecoms)
+RoadRashSpirit Hi Will, as far as I know you can't test using your tone generator and even if the tone is a bit weaker you will have nothing to compare it to so it won't be much help. I don't think there is a cheap way of testing unless you have NETWORK CABLE VERIFIER (or can borrow one).
You should be ok because you are probably going to be using it for broadband so you will be no where near the limit of the cable so fingers crossed it won't make any difference. If you use one of the pairs for voice and you can hear an annoying hum on the line (because of the power) then try wrapping the 1.4m bit of cat6 cable in kitchen foil to see if that helps.
Thanks Vince.
+My Mate VINCE Hi thanks, you have confirmed what I was thinking. I was wondering if kitchen foil would do the trick. As for the network verifier unfortunately I don't know any one in telecoms or networking :-(, However your right I will be using it for internet, the most demanding part will be when I'm throwing a LAN party with a few people using steam. Just out of interest if I wanted to use a pair for voice how would that work? Do you have a video on this? I was going to hook everything up to the wall socket as you described in one of your videos. Does this mean my router will only use certain pairs and others are redundant? Just for clarity I will have my main home hub connected to a cat6 wall socket in the house, cat6 runs to my workshop and terminates in another wall socket. I then run a cable between this and my workshop router which will be set up as a repeater.
Can you use the receiver without the transmitter?
There is a little quicker way most of the time. when you touch the copper of the wires, you become the antenna for the device and the sound will amplify. sure you can double check and short it as he shows, never bothered.
My name is Vince for Mr. telephone ☎️
Came across your video checking out some new Jordan toots 😂 where are you going to start a channel Mr. telephone ?
Can you send the tone down a single core cable using either the red or black crocodile clip and detect it at the other end?
Unfortunately not, you would have to clip one clip ( red or black) to one end and then with the remaining clip you would need to use a fly lead to pick the other end up so you can only really test for continuity of the cable.
Can a tester pick up a junction box behind a dry wall ?
Never plug an RJ11 plug into an RJ45 socket! (6:50) They can permanently damage the socket by bending pins 1 and 8 out of position. And cause arcing in a socket with power over ethernet. Take the extra minute to crimp a cable with the proper connectors or use an adapter.
Can you test just one Single Wire at a time? Such as using it in an
Automotive situation or for Trailer-Camper wire mapping after someone
else has made a bunch of splices and re-wiring?
you may want to see this video ua-cam.com/video/gCKOAnnSb3c/v-deo.html
Does it work for only one cable(wire) ?
I want one piece to get this product
Hi,
I want to buy this product but I'm not sure it fits my needs.
This is my problem, I've got a cable coming out of the wall, but a don't now where it goes to in the wall.
Can I put the isolator on the cable and than move the probe around the surface of the wall and track the cable to see where it go's? Or is it just going to make noise when I get to the end of the cable ? Because that would be a problem because I don't now where the cable go's to so I don't now where it ends
grtz Maarten
Hi, on the professional version (£100 +) you can often trace a wire in a wall especially on a stud wall (plasterboard wall) but on these cheaper version it would be too hard to hear the tone. Not sure about the layout in your property but maybe if you lift the floorboards above the wall or below the wall you may see the cable.
Thanks.
Would it increase the detection range if you grounded one end of the transmitter, and then connected the transmitter to the wire being traced?
With my Triplett Fox and Hound, I can pick up the signal from at least two feet away, and the tone volume increases in amplitude as the signal strength goes up, so it makes it fairly easy to track. Not sure if this one varies its volume with the signal strength; I guess it probably does but it didn't seem to be that sensitive. Looks like it had to be nearly touching the wire before it sounded.
Can someone explain to me how this works? Does the probe detect using induction? Because induction needs current and current needs a closed loop. Here we don't have a closed loop. So how and what does the probe detects?
truthfully i bought the cheap cable tester which arrived as part of a package i tried it on a bust ethernet which i knew to be broken internally as i tested it multiple times on my laptop router strangely all the lights lit up in sequence so my only theory is that the copper inside is still attached but not enough to allow data through unless anyone else has another theory
how to find a cable cut location,
I've got a similar cable tracker, but they're absolutely useless, constantly giving me false positives! My cables are terminated into a gigabit patch panel in the upstairs of my house, so I connect the scanner/oscillator to the patch panel and then I try and track the cable with the probe at the other end, which is downstairs, but I either get static or multiple cables beeping. I think the only sure way to find out which cable is which, is to terminate the downstairs ends into their own keystones and do a continuity test. Unless you have any other ideas?
Never put a tone on a cable that has conditions on it . Always make sure its disconnected . Otherwise you will get it bleeding over to other cables on your system ..
Tone and probe sounds cooler.
Vince, i have my UA-cam channel and i make everything on my channel.
I am from brazil and i am from Teixeira de Freitas - BA.
👌👍
Will it work on HDMI cables
I'm quite positive it will. It's gonna be hard to contact specific pins in the HDMI plug with those big alligator clips, but if you have a female with the wires exposed in the back or it was a home-made wire and you can access the wires before the end plug, there's no reason for it not to work.
In order for this device to work you're having to short two wires together. What if you only have one wire that's say 25m long and you want to check if there's a break in the wire.
You would need to take a multimeter, set it to ohms/continuity, take the one lead from your multimeter and connect to the single core and then with your other lead on the multimeter you would need to run a fly lead( a long ass lead) out to the other end of the single core cable, you should hear a continuous beep(shorting of cable) to indicate continuity of the cable.
but this cable tracker detect where is the short-circuit on the cable? ..dont understand, if only detect a short-circuit (if so its like a continuity tester) or if it find where is the cable damage? for exemple a cable broken or with a internal short-circuit, it find where is it on the long cable to allow me repair that segment of the cable?
It just traces the wires so if you have a big bundle of wires you can find the cable you are working on.
ok understand, its just a continuous tester, where the toner is apart from the prove... im not search a tracker like one, i need to check on a simple and single wire where is the damage or short-circuit, to repair it cutting the cable on that segment where is damage or truncaked and repair the cable jointing it, this do avoid buy a new and long cable and change all cable. Need a tracker with TDR function (che0pa one, because for professional or electricians works where have to repair big cables and cables with lot of wires, they use one like this: bit.ly/2bnAi3M). That one is just a continuous tester..cant detect the place where is the cable is damage..
You would need something that injects a signal in the wire. Then a detector for the signal. As you detect along the wire the place where the signal stops would be where the short is.
The Triplett Fox 2 and Hound 3 that I have is able to inject a signal into a wire that is able to get detected a pretty good distance away from the wire, as long as the transmitter has a good ground connection. The range of detection on the one in the video appears to be pretty short, but maybe it would have been able to do better with a ground connection on one side rather than just connecting two open wires to it.
So basically, when you short a wire and it doesn’t make a sound, you’ve traced it to the right cable?
Yes
Camera man.. is driving me crazy
you should change the cameraman !!!
Where'd the kitchen sink go?
No good on car wiring harness for fault finding.
5855
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טווס
Chinese low quality one-tone product.