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Reviews For: Riser Bond 1210 Time Domain Reflectometer

Category: Antenna Analyzers

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Review Summary For : Riser Bond 1210 Time Domain Reflectometer
Reviews: 1MSRP:
Description:
Self powered time domain reflectometer for field applications.
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.riserbond.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0015
W9LBB Rating: 2008-06-21
Indispensible for antenna nuts! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The 1210 TDR is an older Riser Bond model that was popular with the cable TV market. It shows up occasionally on the used market at pretty good prices, tho at the moment the newer 1270 and 1270A are more available and popular with hams.

The 1210 doesn't have serial port support for downloading information into a PC like the 1270 does, but it has a feature the 1270 doesn't, and which can be quite useful in many applications. The 1210 includes an internal thermal printer that is used to print out the traces for later examination.

Thermal printers may be a sort of old technology, but they're still supported quite well. Rolls of printer paper is available locally at the neighborhood Office Depot; apparently there's a bunch of cash registers and similar gizmos that use the same stuff.

For those who have never used a TDR in antenna work before, it's a revelation.

One thing that most hams tend to try to use forever is coax... considering the arm and a leg cost of good cable, that's quite understandable. Likewise, we're also on the lookout for bargains in coax.

A TDR will give you a pretty accurate assessment of cable condition. In addition, if you know the velocity factor of the cable in question, a TDR will wive you a quite accurate length measurement of the cable remaining on a partial roll at a hamfest!

There are a lot of cable connectors at bargain basement prices at hamfests. A lot of them are junk. A good TDR will sniff out a bad connector in no time... likewise, it'll show you quickly if a connector that's 75 feet in the air up a tower has a bad gasket that allowed water to leak in.

Sections of coax that have been subjected to excess heat and suffered from dielectric flowing also show up well on a TDR. Center conductor breaks, shield breaks, bends that are too sharp, water ingress... they'll all show up on a TDR's trace, and if you have the cable's velocity factor programmed in correctly, the box will also show you within a couple of feet how far from the connection point of the TDR the fault is.

It won't replace an antenna analyzer or RF impedence bridge... but it'll tell you just about everything you need to know about your transmission lines.