Troubleshooting cable with a laptop?

[eightcrazymooses]

I was talking to a Dish tech, who was installing at my neighbors house, and amough other things, he said that they had laptop software that could diagnose a cable line, and signal issues, and even tell if it had a splitter on it, or what. He said they got it from Dish. does anyone know where I can get this software/connectors? REALLY REALLY REALLY want this!

 

[Awohar]

Time Domain Reflectometers are used to test cables. They send a signal down the line and the instrument calculates how much time has passed for the signal to return. every change in impedance causes a reflected wave of signal to bounce back to the TDR, which then analyzes the delay as well as the characteristic of the reflection.

Think of it like bouncing a tennis ball off the wall at the end of the hallway. If your wall is flat, the tennis ball would come straight back (minus the effect of gravity), If the wall was leaning away from you, the ball would come back but this time it would bounce up as it came back. if the wall was leaning towards you, the ball would head to the ground. So if you were to bounce a ball off a wall you couldn't see, you could still tell if the wall was flat, leaning away, or leaning towards you based on how the ball comes back. You could even tell how far away the wall was by how long it takes the tennis ball to come back. If the ball never comes back then there isn't a wall. That would be a rare perfect cable termination.

still, I'm not aware of any software TDRs, however heres a PCMCIA card with TDR

TDR, Wire Cable, & Power Test - CM Technologies-TDR Card