Development of a Monitoring System for Multichannel Cables Using TDR

The purpose of this paper is to improve the management of cables that need much time and work in the measurement environment that has many multichannel cables. Therefore, a monitoring system that inspects faults and connection states of multichannel cables is suggested and designed. The system is based on time-domain reflectometry (TDR) and has two features that distinguish it from the precedent researches. One of them is a hardware interface for the multipair cable, which is a channel distributor designed using a switch. The other is the TDR-signal analysis algorithm based on the database. In other words, the system can check a number of signal wires included in a multichannel cable automatically with one step. In addition, it is able to show results of the signal analysis immediately. The performance of such a system is verified through tests. As a result, it is shown that the monitoring system is fast and reliable and it provides a reasonable analysis result on the TDR signal.