Twinax cable Active and Passive Testing

[johndnoob]

Hello Network Engineers,

I am a noob in the networking world.  I am hoping to one day be able to answer questions such as the one I am posting and share as much as I learn with the rest of the community as I gain experience and knowledge.  I am trying to find out if there is a piece of testing equipment that can test end to end Twinax cables both active (built in electronics) and passive.   If there is no equipment or tester is there a procedure, I or anyone can use on a cisco device via the tdr (time domain reflectometry) command in various devices to test this.  I have seen in some places where a site will setup a test environment that is up and functional, but no critical data is running through it.  They will take a suspected bad cable and watch the whether the connection drops and returns.  I am curious as to how these are quality tested.  Is there a special software, hardware, or both needed? The primary reason is to potentially test this when we are installing new equipment and at new or older sites.

Cheers!

[Reza Sharifi · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Hard to test Twinax cables because the cable is connected to the SFPs and you can't separate them. So, the easiest way to test would be to connect the cable to 2 switches and see if the ports light up or not.

HTH

[johndnoob]

Thanks, I had a feeling that may be the case, but had to try and ask.  I read an article a while back that kind of had a possible solution, but I do not think it would be feasible.  Options for Testing Twinax Cables - NetCraftsmen  This article is an older article but asks the same general question I had. 

[Reza Sharifi]

Not very common and hard to find, but there is a tester for it. At first glance, it looks like a Coax tester than twinax but if interested, you may want to give them a call. Also, Twinax cables are so cheap these days, and this tester maybe a lot more than simply replacing a couple of bad cables.

https://itc-direct.com/twinax-cable-tester.html

HTH