Jim Brown wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:58:22 -0700, jimlux wrote:
>
>> Most rental yards have a cable locator. It comes with a little box with
>> a cliplead that puts a low frequency AC on the cable (or pipe) you're
>> trying to find, and the locator that looks for the signal. Used all the
>> time with modern plastic gas pipes (typically with a wire wrapped around
>> it to facilitate this process)
>
> It seems like it ought to be possible to improvise something that would do
> the job. One thing that would probably work is to drive the cable shield
> (end to end) with a 1kHz signal that is feeding an ordinary power amplifier
> (like what's in your home stereo) and look for it with a magnetic coil
> that's connected to a portable headphone amplifier. Two easy-to-use coils
> are 1) a dynamic mic; 2) a de-gaussing coil.
>
> Another possible test signal is a QRP transmitter running on 160M loading
> the cable shield as a long wire, then look for it on a portable RX. Even a
> signal generator might put out enough signal to be heard on a portable AM
> radio.
>
> 73, Jim K9YC
the commercial units have a specially designed sense coil with a well
defined null, so you can find exactly when the coil is over the pipe/wire
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