I put a warble tone out on a known buried wire today, using a copper
water pipe outside my house for ground. The water pipe doesn't go
underground except way on the other end of the house, so it was
sub-optimal.=20

It worked great for the wire above ground, easily four feet away my
detector was clipping.=20

But as soon as the wire went underground I got nothing, absolutely
nothing. The test wire is in a plastic conduit less than a foot below
ground.

My setup used a warble tone on an MP3 player running into a
reasonably-capable integrated amplifier putting out about 25 VAC. For
the detector I had a telephone handset amplifier I modified for high
input impedance and a stiff wire probe about a foot long.

The buried wire was a power cable, I also tried driving one conductor
signal hot and another signal ground. Not very mych range aboveground,
nothing below.

I'll try again driving in a local ground stake.

Bob


--=20
http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service

--=20
http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
.