The Right Way and Wrong Way to Dress Long Cables.

Believe it or not, there is a right and wrong way to shorten those long cables in your system.

The best way is to cut the cable to the correct length and re-terminate it. However, that is not always an option.

If you coil the wire up like a rattle snake, you make an antenna. This antenna can bite you with some nasty noise venom. Not only does coiling the wire open a lot of loop area, the loop is concentrated because it occupies the same loop area more than once.

If you fold the cable in half and then put it in a bundle, the loop area is greatly reduced.

This is real, not marketing! I've seen this make a difference in electrical instrumentation more than once! One of the times it took about 1.4V differential to cause a noise problem and we were seeing noise problems. Folding the excess cable in half and then bundling it fixed the noise pick up problem.

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First version 7-15-2002
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