Comment by ricardobeat
2 days ago
I remember seeing a recent analysis where the vast majority of cables from Amazon misreported their capabilities. Is this tool going to be able to catch those, or blindly report what the chip advertises?
2 days ago
I remember seeing a recent analysis where the vast majority of cables from Amazon misreported their capabilities. Is this tool going to be able to catch those, or blindly report what the chip advertises?
I think for real cables the delta could also be explained by damage or just a bad plug-in attempt, so even if you're not trying to detect counterfeit cables it could be useful to know:
1. What does the host support
2. What does the cable support
3. What does the device support
4. What actually got negotiated
The tool can only tell you what the cable says. Detecting the gauge and composition of the wires in the cable is either destructive or requires temperature probes.
Detecting whether the signal characteristics are close enough to in-spec or not requires a speed test, perhaps, but that also doesn't necessarily mean the cable is the problem if such a test failed.
This would be super to have! I do a lot of software defined radio work and the quality of USB (C) cables is pretty much a wild west. I needed some for a workshop and it was almost impossible to find a cable that didnt have crazy reflections and interference at all frequencies. I went through 6 different brands and vendors. In the end the cleanest signal came from an original Apple Type C cable (around 20usd). I am not sure if its because their shielding, differential pairs or signal integrity computation (iirc there is like a pretty beefy soc in the connector), or that I used it with an Apple Macbook. Some of the cables I found to perform badly were cut open, revealing missing shielding and none of them had twisted pairs.