John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺<p>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.</p><p>It's useful for testing long cables and finding where there's a break.</p><p>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.)</p><p>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*.</p><p>That's only about 1.9 × 10^8 m/s.</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dom</span><span class="invisible">ain_reflectometer</span></a></p><p><a href="https://sfba.social/tags/TimeDomainReflectometer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TimeDomainReflectometer</span></a><br><a href="https://sfba.social/tags/TimeDomainReflectometry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TimeDomainReflectometry</span></a><br><a href="https://sfba.social/tags/TDR" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TDR</span></a></p>