In this article, a unified method for fault locating and length measurement of the branch cable is proposed. First, typical two-port equivalent networks are extracted by means of a topology analysis of the branch cable, and their scattering parameters (S-parameters) are adopted to achieve the proposed method, due to their excellent performance on characterizing the wave propagation. Then, taking advantage of the inherent relation of the elements in the S-parameters matrix, the analytical formulae for evaluating the branch length and identifying the fault location in a branch cable are derived. This method is simple but effective and appears to be promising for real applications. Moreover, the proposed method is proved to be bound to identify the real fault location without ambiguity. In order to validate this method, some experiments with RG-59 cables are carried out and the accuracy of the proposed method is analyzed. Theory and examples also show its robustness against the fault impedance and terminations.

中文翻译：

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基于S参数测量的分支同轴电缆长度评估和故障定位的统一方法


本文提出了一种统一的分支电缆故障定位和长度测量方法。首先，通过分支电缆的拓扑分析提取典型的二端口等效网络，并采用它们的散射参数（S参数）来实现所提出的方法，因为它们在表征波传播方面具有优异的性能。然后，利用S参数矩阵中元素的内在关系，推导了评估分支电缆长度和识别分支电缆故障位置的解析公式。这种方法简单而有效，并且在实际应用中似乎很有前景。此外，所提出的方法被证明能够准确地识别真实的故障位置。为了验证该方法，利用RG-59电缆进行了一些实验，并分析了该方法的准确性。理论和实例还表明了它对故障阻抗和终端的鲁棒性。