RF line tracers for things like 10BT cabling or power cabling are pretty basic things. Would something like that work on a PCB level? Perhaps injecting a very low voltage p-p wave onto a contact point on a PCB and using either direct physical contact with other trace points or perhaps just above the board (tracing the end point on a mulilayer PCB perhaps) If the peak to peak voltage of the injected signal was around 200mv's say it wouldn't even pass a diode excluding capacitve coupling. Anyone want to chime in about the practicality and possible hurdles of makeing something like that and it's usefulness? I run across a lot of multilayer PCB's that I'm just completly clueless on tracing signals because the lines are on a 3rd or 4th layer, and it'd be useful to get a better clue of where various points ended up. I know there's a lot of minor inductive and capacitive coupling effects on PCB's but it should be able to give an approximate clue as to the impedance (at least at the modulating frequency) of two contact points on a PCB.

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17 hours and still not a single comment?

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