#timedomainreflectometry — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #timedomainreflectometry, aggregated by home.social.
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I'm thinking about using time-domain reflectometry to find the fault(s) on a string of Christmas lights.
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Relatively recently, I got interested in time-domain reflectometry, which is essentially just sending a pulse down a cable and measuring the amount of time for its reflection to return.
It's useful for testing long cables and finding where there's a break.
I bought a little device that plugs into my oscilloscope and provides a USB-powered low-frequency oscillator for doing this. (Total kit cost is <$400.)
It also provided a good "object lesson" by showing me that the signal traveled through some coaxial cable only at about 66% of c, reminding me about that last part of its definition as the speed of light *in a vacuum*.
That's only about 1.9 × 10^8 m/s.
According to a quote from "Computer Networks - A Systems Approach (5th Ed)", a signal through copper wire could propagate at 2.3 × 10^8 m/s and through optical fiber it's just 2.0 × 10^8 m/s.
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Repairing a broken cable using TDR