An introduction to "twin-ax" cabling and connections!

Wikipedia article on "twin-ax": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinaxi...
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[@TravellingVikings]

Brings back some memories from my IBM day's. Lost count of how many of these twinax cables I've terminated! The biggest fun though was to use the Oscilloscope to diagnose a short in the cable, as these would invariably be run all over the place and once they stopped working it was usually due to a break or a short. Therefore using the Oscilloscope with the 1Khz square wave allowed you to pinpoint the distance to the short or break. It was then easier to find the location of the cabel in the cable run to fix or replace.. IBM used to charge customer a fair bit for our work doing this!

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Good tips! I've never actually had to handle twinax. I appreciate the practical demonstration. I always understood that twinax was basically the same as coaxial but with 2 conductors instead of a shared one. Coax is better for longer distances and lower frequencies. Albeit, cabling is far from my area of expertise.

[@IBM_Museum]

But twin-ax is "balanced" phases, so the cabling (for the 1Mbitps speed) can be very long distances.

[@IBM_Museum]

There's also a pass-through twin-ax box that IBM used for early 5250 emulation adapters: ibmmuseum.com/Adapters/5250/IBM/MCA/3638FFF8/Breakout.jpg