Lab Exercises with a Coaxial Cable

By FEW and PMS January 17 - 28, 2000

Introduction

In this, our first laboratory for Physics 335, we investigated the properties of a RG-58U Coaxial Cable. The lab can be broken up into 4 major exercises:

• Calculating the speed of an electrical pulse within the cable. From this information, we can experimentally calculate the speed of light.

• Producing standing waves within the cable and measuring all resonant frequencies.

• Measuring the impedance of the coax cable through the use of load resistors

• Experimentally calculating the inductance and capacitance of the cable and using these values to validate our previous results.

 Materials

A 1000ft (304.8m) RG-58U coaxial cable (in brown box) A Tektronix TDS 320 Digital Oscilloscope with 10x probe A Cadet breadboard on which all circuits were built Several computer programs such as Origin, Excel, and LabView which were used to acquire and analyze data

Navigation

• Learn more about coaxial cables
• View our laboratory procedure and results
• Read our conclusions