Hello.

I have this toner/ probe kit.

[Link: greenlee.com]

It can find hidden wires fine but cables with shielding or UTP cable is more difficult to find.

I recall reading thread where a fellow mentioned a way to use the kit that yielded a stronger result. I seem to recall it included maybe holding one lead of the tone generator on your fingers or something along that line.

If anyone knows what I'm referring to would you mind explaining it? Sorry I couldn't be more specific.

Thanks.

Craig.

You can hold the lead, or ground it. Clip the other lead to the center or braid, whichever works best.

Only connect one toner lead to wire then have a partner hold the other toner lead tight on bare skin of hand while you use the wand to search. I dont know the physics behind this but it seems to amplify the tone.

Awesome. Thanks.

When you ground it would it be considered bad form to use the ground pin on a receptical?

Craig.

Adding...

I have had better luck toning out RG6 by stripping it and putting 1 lead on the center conductor and having someone hold the other lead. It makes it easier to pinpoint which RG6 it is.

Put RED alligator clip on conductor(s)' then insert the BLACK alligator clip in to the ground of the nearest power outlet.

First, turn the probe's volume high. Once, you feel like you've found the wire, radually turn down the volume and you still hear the tone contually.... Very sure you've tone rage right one.

Another step, just want to make sure. Put both alligator clips on any two conductor, switch the tone generator to conuity mode and ask your helper to watch for the LED turns GREEN while you go to the other end of the wire to twist the same conductors together.

Invest at least a decent pair of 2-way radio.

Bad form? Someone here is worried about bad form?

There should be no difference in using the pin or clipping it onto the closest metal junction box.

Nope, done this many a time over the years.

Thanks everyone.

Two way radio - have it.

I always do continuity checks as a final check so we're on the same page there.

However, in this case I'm referring to finding a wire that has been covered in a wall, and that I need to cut a hole to pull it out, making very important that I find the EXACT spot where it is.

With cat5e especially I have found that holding the toner up to the side of it yields a weak response, so finding it behind drywall or in a ceiling is very much hit or miss. Holding the probe to the end of the cat5e gives a great result of course but then that doesn't work when it's in the wall.

Thanks again.

I'll do some experimentation.

Craig

In that case,just connect one lead.

Leave the other hanging and if it doesn't work,ground the hanging lead.

Usually a shielded or self shielding cable will limit the distance that can be toned with both leads connected.

It's the nature of the beast.

You motivated me to write this down. It's now in my tech info directory. If you don't like long posts, read the last two lines.

How to use a toner

As I remember the instructions, which I quit using a long time ago, they tell you to connect the red and black to the hot and ground, respectively, of a wire pair, whether it’s shielded or not, and use the wand to locate the wire at the other end. This will work.

However, unless you have DC voltages present, there is no difference between the red and the black wires/alligator clips, so right at the start they’re not telling you all you can know. They’re telling you something that is guaranteed to work. A parallel case is some idiot cable installs we’ve seen, done by installers who don’t understand what they are doing but have been taught one (that’s ONE) way to successfully connect a cable box.

Moving on: connecting to hot and ground of a shielded cable lets you find the wire if you’re about an inch away from it. That’s not always sufficient. And if you’re tracing a twisted pair, you’ll have equal trouble. You know that shielding keeps signals from getting into a cable, and twisting of the wire keeps noise from being picked up by the twisted pair, right? Well, duh, if you hook a toner to a shielded cable that way, the isolation properties of the wires will make it hard for the wand to sense the signal because the signal wont' be radiated well.

One day I discovered, while trying to trace some speaker wires, that if I connected one alligator clip to a power ground and the other clip to a speaker wire (one conductor is all it takes), the wand can detect the wire's presence from as much as four feet away from the wire! That first time with this method, I traced wire above ceilings from one room to another, tracing sixty feet of attic wiring from the main floor in less than a minute. I recommend this method. Highly.  In fact, only.

But if a bunch of wires are right next to each other for fifty feet, every wire will have tone on it at different levels. Here’s where some understanding and finesse is needed.

Let’s say you’re tracing from a speaker location to the amp location. At the amp location, wave the wand around and see if you can get one to four wires with tone on them. Separate those from the rest.

Now lay all four across your hand so the jackets of all four touch your hands in the same way. When you now touch the jacket with the wand, ONE wire will have louder tone, or lower 60 Hz buzz, or both. Turn the volume up or down so you hear the differences clearly. I usually adjust the volume so the LED on my wand only comes on with one conductor. When you get that, THAT is your wire.

Did you notice we didn't touch the wire, just the insulating jacket?  And picked up tone from it?  Yes, it's true.

After you've located what you think is the wire, always do a continuity test to be sure you’ve got the right one. You'll make some mistakes the first few times you use this method when there are lots of wires, but carefully following the process I outlined, you'll soon learn to recognize when you've found the correct wire.

If you’re trying to trace a shielded wire, don’t connect to its hot lead. Connect to its shield. That way the shield won’t keep the signal from radiating and being picked up by the wand.

There’s one thing that gets in the way of this: grounding of the wire that you connect the toner to. If the shield is grounded, the wand won’t help you with this method. If the speaker wire or the twisted pair is grounded, you have a similar problem, but only if the wire that's grounded is the one you try to attach the toner to. If you have a four-conductor speaker wire and one or two wires are grounded, you can use this method with an ungrounded conductor. With twisted pair, this is the one time I say connect both wires of a pair together and use them as though they are one conductor.

The grounded wires will take some of the signal to ground, making this method less effective than if all the wires are disconnected at both ends, but still very effective compared to just following the instructions. And in this testing method, a speaker wire connected to an AVR is effectively grounded, even if it's not really grounded. Which brings up another thing: if you put tone on several wires, you'll sense tone all over the place. Connect the toner only to one conductor at a time.

Also note that as you identify wires, if you put connectors on and connect them to the system, they will become effectively grounded and it will get easier to distinguish the remaining wires as the connected wires won’t have signal on them to confuse you.

Once I was tracing RG6 using this method and I kept getting a squirrely result on one wire. Every single wire had a particular kind of sound at the toner except for this one: it was quieter and had more buzz. I figured it might help to describe what I was hearing. Knowing that wires traveling near other wires get some tone but not much, I came up with this: one of these cables is very near the wire I’m trying to locate but the tone is not loud and clear enough for me to say they are actually connected. I then searched, and WOW above a ceiling I found the wire I had my toner on… knotted to the wire that my wand had identified. Whoever did the prewire had run out of cable, intended to splice above the ceiling, and tied the wires together to make them easier to see later. Then they did not come back and do it. But knowing how the tone sounds, knowing the meaning of relative volume on adjacent wires, I was able to work out what to look for.

I might have missed something..........

For those who don't like long posts: Learn to understand how the toner and wand work; ignore the instructions.

Thanks for the detailed post Ernie

ywelc

I just finished reading the Ernieisms links [Link: remotecentral.com] with all kinds of misspellings and bad grammar, so I have to ask; did you type this horrendous post on purpose or did it just come out that way?

Maybe it was phone's or tablet's autocorrect.

If this is how you normally communicate, I apologize for calling you out on it.

With Category cable, be it UTP or STP it's best to use more than one conductor due to the noise rejection and/or cancellation properties of the twisted pair.

I usually start with stripping all 8 wires (4 pairs) and use one side of the toner to capture them all.
If I get too strong of the signal, I have had equally good results with using 1 of the pairs, as well as using 4 solid or 4 striped wires tied together onto one side of the toner.

The other lead from the toner always starts in the grounded plug, I use round screwdriver the rough size of the grounded outlet hole.
If the signal is too strong, inconsistent or is bleeding over too many wires, I disconnect the grounded lead.