Anyone found a way to make your toner output a stronger signal?

I have to tone out 6 pairs of speakers for a job I didn't wire, and I'm not getting any hits with my toner as it is now.

how about a good sized antenna amp and a couple of transformers?

I would hope it has an Impedence matching VC in line. You might want to pull that out of the wall and disable the impedence matching for toning purposes.

No VC's

I'm guessing you are grounding one of the wires on your toner? if not ground the black and hook the spkr wires to the red and your signal will increase tremendously...

Turn off as many electrical breakers as you can in house you are working in, use flash lights if you have to. You will have much better results. Further what kind on toner are you using?

I'm not sure I understand, Earth ground the speaker wire?

What I have going on is a 16/4 (8 of em), and who knows where they go?

I twisted the red and green wires, and hooked them to the red lead on my toner, and black and white go to the black lead on the toner.

I have a feeling the wires are burried behind the insulation, and I cant get a tone at the other end.

What I want to do is somehow hop up the uotput of the tone generator so the probe can find it.

I thought about popping the breakers, I'll try that next week, the tonet set is a Steren.

Try only using one lead out of your toner. Some toners when toning multi-conductor wires over distance will effectivly cancel themselves out. Using both leads is for when you have a speaker hooked up, use one lead only when trying to find a buried wire in a wall.

Jason

Series a pair of 9V batteries. It will work for a short while :)

Fish, Eric means that you should ground the toner's black lead and connect only the red to the speaker wires, even all four conductors.

I once got the strongest signal in some CAT-5 by connecting the black lead to an aluminum ladder, even better than to a true ground.

The high-gain amp (receiver) works best when there is a large difference between the wire you're tracing and earth, as with radio waves.

Connecting both leads results in a small difference between the wires and ground; remember, the receiver is a single-wire device.

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com

keep in mind a toner is nothing more than a noise injector. if the wire is shielded - attach to the shield, if cat 5 - use 2 different colors, if quad shield - go for an outer shield. M ake it so the noise can make it out of the wire.

Thanks Fellas,
I'll try grounding it next week. I always hooked up both leads to the wire in question, and it always worked. But then again, I always kind of knew where the wire was located too.

The guy who wired this place wired it for Bose, then went out of business. What a nightmare.

Dude, you will notice a BIG signal gain when you ground the black wire. Just shove a screw driver into the ground in an outlet and attach the black wire lead to it..
hook the red lead to your wire you are trying to locate..

This is THE way to use a toner, because you can often follow the wires with the pickup four or five feet away. That means that you can walk down a hall waving the picup and sense wires in an attic.

This trick is not universally known. I showed it to a 20-year phone company employee a year ago. He was amazed.

When you do this, and there are a bunch of wires to choose from, lay them out in a flat series on your hand and then go from one to another with the pickup. If the wire is there, you will ALWAYS get a louder signal on it (unless it is 100' long running the whole way next to another lead -- in that case, confirm with a continuity test). Also, the correct wire will have the least amount of AC buzz on it, usually none.

This is more sensitive in other ways. A couple of weeks ago we tried locating a cable and the best I could come up with was that I found a cable that was NEXT to the one I wanted somewhere. I went up into the attic and found the one I had located was tied to the one I wanted. The prewire guys had neglected to splice them together. That toner technique simplified things.

I have used this method most recently on a CAT-5 out in the back yard where I stuck one alligator clip into the soil. It worked great.