BNC Tester

Continuity tester for video cables with BNC connector. The device checks if the shield and the conductor of the cable are connected and there is no short circuit between. It provides a simple and quick way of fault analysis. It's especially handy on the set - eg. if there is no video signal present on your monitor you can easily spot or exclude a broken cable as the culprit or use it when crimping BNC cables to test the crimping result.

A BNC cable is used to distribute RF signals, which puts high requirements on these cables. With the BNC Tester you can not make a statement about the quality of the signal transmission, this requires an expensive eye-pattern measurement device and the skills to interpret the results.

Under some rare conditions, it is possible that BNC Tester shows a positive result, but the video signal is not received by the monitor (or recorder etc).

Please insert a 9-volt battery¹⁾ before using the BNC Tester.

Using the BNC Tester is pretty straight forward:

1. plug in cable
2. wiggle the cable
3. green LED lights → cable is good
4. red LED lights → cable is not good
   • Open Conductor → the inner conductor is broken (mostly because the crimping of strand in the pin is defective, sometimes the hole pin falls out of the connector)
   • Open Shield → the shield is open-circuited (often the strands of the shield wear out and get ripped of, when bending the cable to far and to close to the crimp ferrule)
   • Short → the conductor and the shield are short-circuited (if not all strands are crimped in the pin or the ferrule, the missed strand tend to short the conductors)