By Jacob Shekel and Eric Winston, Jerrold Electronics Corporation
A thorough understanding of cable attenuation as a function of frequency and temperature is of prime importance to the user, as well as the manufacturer, of the cable. This paper describes measurements of attenuation conducted in an automated, computer-controlled test facility, suggests different ways to present the data, and describes the analysis of the data by computer-aided mathematical techniques.
The analysis exposes the differences in the temperature behavior of different cables, and shows how to design an optimum equalization scheme (with fixed and thermal equalizers) for any particular type of cable. The results also indicate that the widely accepted analysis of approximating the frequency response by sqrt(f) and f terms, is not always the correct way to separate the dielectric losses from the conductor losses.