The Art of Cable Tracking

Sooner or later if you advertise yourself as a cable installer, you are going to be asked to complete an unfinished installation.

You can expect to find a heap of un-terminated cables lying on the floor with no idea where the outlets are.

Whilst this may sound daunting it is in fact quite a simple matter to trace cables so long as you have the right tools.

Tone & Tracer

Tone generators are a very old tool in wide use inside and outside of the networking industry.

The basic idea is that you can place an electrical signal onto a cable using a tone generator  and then use a cable tracer wand to find the signal.

You can also use a tone & tracer to test cables for opens, shorts and miss-wires. It certainly isn’t the quickest way to do it, but it will work.

Wire Mappers

With terminated cables you can use one or more wire mappers or remotes. Cable testers usually come with at least one. You simply attach one wire mapper to one end of each cable and then attach you cable tester in turn to each cable noting which identifier you find corresponding to the remote wire map.

So for instance, if you have 5 unidentified cables, attach a wire mapper to each one labeled 1 through 5. Then go to the other end of the cable, usually where the patch panel is, and attach your cable tester. The cable tester will then tell you what the number of the wire mapper is at the other end. You can then label the cable appropriately.

If you have a number of cables to label, simply go through each set in batches labeling as you go.

Outlet Identifier

Whilst outlet identifiers are mostly directed towards IT staff, largely because they rely on a working network being present to work fully.

Large installations have many outlets. After a while, with outlets being moved and changed, documentation and labeling can become out of date.

The outlet identifier is designed to quickly and easily identify the outlet, but also to quickly and easily identify whether an outlet is live or not.

The outlet identifier relies upon a network switch being available. The outlet identifier then blinks the activity lights on the switch to allow easy identification of the switch port. You can then label the patch cable appropriately by following the patch cable back from the switch port.