Troubleshooting Techniques: Using a Fox and Hound Tool | Tech, No Babel

Transcript: You might be wondering what’s a fox and a hound. I know what a fox is. I know what a hound is. What is that in reference to troubleshooting? One of the great things about troubleshooting is you don’t have to just guess all the time. You don’t have to do test after test. Sometimes there are great tools to do it. Now we’ve talked about some of the other tools. We’ve talked about multimeters, etc. I thought that now we would talk about one of the great tools that if you’ve got a bunch of cable and you know where one end is and you think you know where the other end is, but it’s not easy to trace to two, so maybe it goes through a wall, the only way to do that is rip open the wall. That’s no good. Or it goes through a conduit. The only way to do that is pull it out of the conduit only to find out that yeah, it was the one that you wanted. No good.
How do you find out which cable on this end jives up with which cable on that end? There’s a tool called a fox and a hound. It’s also called a tone generator. Well not a tone generator, but anyway. Basically, it is is you’ve got a sending unit which can either have an RJ11 jack on it, an RJ45, the phone jacks. RJ45 is actually a networking jack but it looks like a phone jack. Or it has two alligator clips. That’s what you’re probably going to use most often unless you’re tracing down networking cable or telephone cable, etc.
You clip on the ends to that end of the cable. In the case of let’s say you’re doing RJ6, RJ59 coaxial cable, you would put one end on the braid or one end on the case and then one on the middle. Basically, you have these two little pieces that send it along. If you had something like … I’m looking around here … here, got this. Let’s say that you had this cable, which is an RCA cable. In this case you would clip one to the middle conductor and one on this side here, this other connection. Then on the other end you turn on your sending part of the equation. You turn on that piece and then you go to the other end and you have a probe. Now the probe looks like it’s just a little pointy thing. It’s got a little speaker on it. Some units have lights. Some units have a place for headphones in case it’s a noisy environment or in case it’s an environment where you have to be quiet. Either way.
You point that probe at a cable you suspect is the same as the other one. If you hear beeping, good. You’ve found the cable. If you don’t, you haven’t found the cable or you found a cable that does not connect the entire duration. It has a short in it, which might as well just not be the right cable because if it’s got a short in it, it’s not going to work so move on.
Basically what I would do in this situation, let’s say you have 12 cables on one end and 12 on the other end and you need to know one end connects to the other end. Which is which? No problem. You hook up your fox on one end, your sending unit, and then you go to the other end. I would do the divide and conquer technique which we’ve talked about earlier where you split it up into six and six, point your probe at six of them. Any beeping? No? Point it at the other six. Now you’re down to it’s one of these six. Split that up to three and three.
Repeat over and over again until you get down to it. You’re going to go 12, six, three, two, one, or one, two. Either way, the result is in three or four steps you’re going to know exactly this is the right cable. Take the little plastic thing from a bread bag or a marker or something and label that and then test it out with the actual signal that you’re going to use. Chances are it’s going to work fine and you’re going to be good to go. That is a tool that I would recommend that you take a look at when you’re trying to trace out where does this cable on this end go to this cable on that end.