Detailed Cable Reports.
A useful feature of the cable tester is that it maintains a database of all your cables, sockets and adapters. You can reload cables or harnesses at anytime to view them, compare them to other cables,or even modify them (i.e. add or remove sockets and connections 'manually' using the built-in graphical Cable Editor).
By selecting "View Cable as Text", you can view a cable in text format (which can be printed or saved to disk)
If you provided your own text description for the pins on the cable, you will see your descriptions in the text report (see detailed error reports for an example of these) but if you haven't you will see Cable Doctor's Socket-Number / Pin-Number descriptions, as shown below. Note that it is entirely up to you whether or not you use your own descriptions... it really depends how useful these are in your environment.
First I'll load the following cable (a ribbon cable with 4 sockets on):
You can instantly see all the connections on this cable, although it looks like a wire is missing on Socket 3 (Sockets are numbered top to bottom on the left hand side, followed by top to bottom on the right hand side). I suppose the cable may have been deliberately made like that!
Selecting "View Cable as Text" produces following cable report:
The top of the report gives the name of the cable and shows the sockets it has, and this is followed by a list of the connections from each pin of each socket. You can see that Socket 1 Pin 4 (S1 P4) connects to S2 P4 and S4 P4. (There are no diodes on this cable, but if there were, pins with diodes would also contain a line such as: "& Diodes To: S1 P1.")
Scrolling down we see:
and this shows that Socket 2 Pin 4 (S2 P4) connects to S1 P4 and S4 P4. One line from the bottom you can see that S3 P3 doesn't connect to anything at all.
Clearly our cable tester makes it very easy see exactly where every wire goes to and comes from, which is very convenient for simple cables, and an absolute God-send if your cables are complicated.
You should note that the report above isn't necessarily showing that the cable has a fault... it simply shows what the wiring is. Text reports are basically documents describing the cable that has been tested. If the wire or harness has been made incorrectly, then this document is probably the only docuument you have got, which can certainly be helpful for sorting out the problem.
Lastly, you can produce comparison reports to show what, if any, differences there are between two cables in the cable database. Having loaded a cable from the Cable Database, select the "Compare two Cables" menu option and choose the cable you want to compare it with. I've chosen a "normally wired" ribbon cable to compare against, which produces the following comparison report:
So, before you even think of buying a far more expensive tester from one of Cabledoc's competitors - perhaps one with a tiny 4 line LCD screen, costing 3, 4 (or maybe more) times the price - ask yourself these questions....
"Can it do anything like as much as a Cable Doctor?"....
"Can it show me what's wrong [and what's right] with my cables like a Cable Doctor?"....
"Can it draw circuit diagrams, and offer user-defined descriptions like as a Cable Doctor?"....
"Is it as easy to use a Cable Doctor?"
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