[Bertho] sent in a great tutorial on terminating transmission lines. If you’ve ever tried to send a high frequency signal a long way down a wire, you know the problems that can crop up due to electronic strangeness. Luckily [Bertho]‘s tutorial explains just about everything, from where and when to terminate a cable and why signals get screwed up in long wires.

[Bertho] begins his lesson by taking two oscilloscopes and 20 m of CAT5 cable with the twisted pairs wired in series to make an 80 meter long transmission line. A ~100kHz square wave was sent down the cable after being displayed on the first oscilloscope, and picked up on the other end by the second oscilloscope. It’s a great way to show the changes in a signal over a long cable run, and how small changes in the circuit (just adding a simple resistor) can affect the signal coming out of a cable.

It’s a great post that demystifies the strange electrical gremlins that pop up when you’re running a length of wire. Great job, [Bertho].