Advanced line toning tricks

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Great for MDUs with 5000000 cut/disconnected lines.

we don't have any mdu's that big.  will it still work for me??

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Should be able to do that with just two paper clips soldered to a barrel, right?

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wow , " brown meter" .......is that the same as the blue one?             lol

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My favorite tone method is my handheld. Pair it with my personal cell phone, call the hheld on my personal, put one on speakerphone, place near the tv and turn the volume way up. Go to the splitters, and start pulling lines while listening on the other phone. When the sound goes dead or static (analog) there's your line! Works through any amount of splitters. 

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my god that's brilliant.  you sir are a genius!   

+1

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I modified my 77hp tracer 2 (the one with the red/black aligator leads and rj11 jack) with a barrel in the body and leads internally soldered to the red/black leads(looks pretty sleek and the other techs are jealous of my genius) to tone lines.  This will tone thru ANYTHING, unpowered amps, splitters, shorts, etc. and you just use the wand like you would with twisted pair.  Also helps in locating breaks or how the line runs in drywall. Great for MDUs with 5000000 cut/disconnected lines.

I often thought about doing that, I have the exact same toner actually.  How did you modify it?  I thought of a way to do it by modifying the wand and the generator but It involved using a carrier freq( say 550 mhz) mixed with a audible tone (say 1k) and then outputting the difference frequency from the wand so you would hear a audible 1k tone.  The reason for using a high freq. carrier being so it would go through splitters.  I'm just interested to see how you did yours.

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The complete assembly




Here you can see where I cut off the back portion of the barrel for clearance in the toner and access to the springclip inside to solder my jumper on.  Red jumper is soldered to the springclip, brown to the nut, and the white jumper is just to keep pressure on the barrel guts so they don't get pushed out.  I keep a short coax jumper permanately attatched to the barrel in order to keep the possibility of failure to a minimum.  if i need a female end I just put another barrel on the end of my jumper.  I also stuck in a piece of plastic between the PCB and barrel because they were touching.




And here are my jumpers soldered to the PCB, this is the backside of where the red & black leads w/alligator clips are soldered to.




Really easy to do, and it's the only toner I use(if they have a coax/phone wallplate, I can hook up both at the same time and tone the coax and twisted for easier work at the dmark balancing signal and backfeeding DT)

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i'm gonna go change my underwear, that's awesome.

+1

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Thats great! I cant wait to have something that will tone through splitters and amps.

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Ya, works freakin wonders, also tones thru bad sections of lines (such as center conductor or braid breaks) and tones thru shorts. I just need to figure out how to up the output power, it seems to get weak going thru a few splitters and couple hundred feet of coax.

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If there is a schematic out there floating around for this im sure you could up the output by modifying the design a little.  Im sure its probably not that complex anyway I may try to reverse engineer it and make a schematic and then up the gain.  Il have to tear it apart tomorrow.

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Ya, works freakin wonders, also tones thru bad sections of lines (such as center conductor or braid breaks) and tones thru shorts. I just need to figure out how to up the output power, it seems to get weak going thru a few splitters and couple hundred feet of coax.

Try using a car battery.

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Very nice solder job. Low heat, proper wire trim. Very nice job indeed. I would pass this with a high grade at QC time.

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that same company already makes a toner that has a barrell on it that does the same thing. it tones thru splitters . i have one somewhere.

http://mccartenco.net/product.php?productid=906&cat=8&page=1