I work as an electrical engineer on military aircraft.
High speed cabling is susceptible to all sorts of nasty "gremlins". I work with copper fibre channel runs, RF and long 1394 runs regularly. I am still preaching the gospel to other technicians and engineers that ringing this cabling out with a multimeter is NOT enough to guarantee that the signaling will get through! This article is the perfect demonstration of this. Those terminations would have rung through using a multimeter, which is just sending a very tiny DC signal, but the TDR analysis showed poor terminations. I have encountered the exact same scenario in my own work.
I worked as an intern at a company installing (then) 100BaseT and FDDI cabling in industrial installations and also office buildings 20 years ago. For every network socket installed, the customer got the (thermal-paper-)printout of a network cable tester.
I'd expect this to be the minimum level of diligence when installing cables on a military aircraft, or shouldn't I? ;-)
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I work as an electrical engineer on military aircraft.
High speed cabling is susceptible to all sorts of nasty "gremlins". I work with copper fibre channel runs, RF and long 1394 runs regularly. I am still preaching the gospel to other technicians and engineers that ringing this cabling out with a multimeter is NOT enough to guarantee that the signaling will get through! This article is the perfect demonstration of this. Those terminations would have rung through using a multimeter, which is just sending a very tiny DC signal, but the TDR analysis showed poor terminations. I have encountered the exact same scenario in my own work.
I worked as an intern at a company installing (then) 100BaseT and FDDI cabling in industrial installations and also office buildings 20 years ago. For every network socket installed, the customer got the (thermal-paper-)printout of a network cable tester.
I'd expect this to be the minimum level of diligence when installing cables on a military aircraft, or shouldn't I? ;-)
I have no data like that for any of my runs unless I go out and do it myself. And I'm working with aircraft that are already done and flying.