Guitar Cable Tester

[Ripdivot]

I recently purchased a programmable looper for my pedal board. This means I had to assemble about 22 patch cables and I wanted to make sure they all worked properly before I installed them. I decided to build a cable tester for the fun of it. This tester can capture very quick open and short circuits in the cable. It is very easy to build. All you need is a plastic enclosure (you can you a metal enclosure but you will need isolated jacks), a couple TRS jacks 1/4", a 9 volt battery and a very easy to build circuit. The tester turns on when you insert a plug into J1 (just like a pedal). The operation of the tester is on the schematic. I hope this is a useful tool for some of you. This tester is for 1/4" unbalanced mono jacks only as I wanted it to be very simple. You can test other unbalanced cables with adapters.