High accuracy location of faults on electrical lines using digital signal processing

A signal processing algorithm is developed for estimating the location of a discontinuity, e.g. a fault, on an electrical line. It is applied to sampled time-domain reflectometry (TDR) data and performs pecstral analysis of the transmitted and reflected pulse signals. The pecstrum algorithm is based on a transform similar to the one used in the well-known cepstrum technique, i.e. the time domain versus `quefrency domain´ transformation. It is demonstrated that the performance of the pecstrum estimator is significantly better than that of the methods proposed so far. This has been substantiated both theoretically and empirically. The proposed solution has been tested, is operational in industrial digital reflectometers, and has been shown to be robust and successful in practice