Not for using an IF collar. An IF fence requires a loop to work.

What?

Oh, I was not thinking of an IF collar, just signal strength.

For the IF collar scheme you could use an external wire as half of the loop. By changing the external loop path, you could define the underground path by slowly learning where the underground path does not exist. This would be sort of an inside out binary search by attempting to half the enclosed area for each iteration. If the enclosed area increases, then you have crossed the underground wire. The shape of the enclosed area will give some clues too because there could be some figure eight nulls where the external loop crosses the buried wire.

More of a science project scheme would be to inject a 1MHz 60Hz AM modulated signal into the speaker wire and attempt to follow the wire with a ferrite antenna based receiver as the listener. These little transmitters were popular at one point.

This IF testing article may provide some food for thought along with the IF installation manual. If I had a fence I might try to repurpose it as a quickie speaker wire locator, but I would not purchase a system simply for use as a wire tracer.

That’s the most screwed up instructions I’ve ever seen. Those were created for end user customers that have no tech skill. I’d just go rent a cable tracker if I couldn’t find one to borrow. It’s what the IF installers use. There is an old trick using an am radio. But I never learned it

This- pull a fresh cable from the headend to the speaker on a route known not to be the path underground. Splice in to create the loop without cancellation.

Most municipalities possess locators that can be borrowed or rented. Had a client that did this to locate a driveway sensor for us.

I have a Tempo 508s. Had it for years, gets used once every few years. Used it last week to figure out the pathway of a non working security camera that was a long ways away from the main house and 18" down in conduit.

Was able to follow the wire from the camera.....all the way to the point where the wire broke... Under a decent sized tree that was a sapling 15 years ago when the wire was run (not by me).

Oops.

Nice. In the real world, how deep does it go do yah think