War wagon for analog

RTD and thermocouple plugs and jacks

RTD and thermocouple plugs and jacks

Red heat shrink tubing and a butane lighter

Lots of places use the clear wire in Belden twisted pair cable as the signal wire (+) and others use it as the common (-).

If I have to service it, I put a short length of red heat shrink on whichever is plus because my memory is poor and I grew up fixing cars where red was (+). Works for me.

It seems like you should be able to look at what parts you have used for service calls over the past year and create a master list of parts to stock your van.

danw said:

Lots of places use the clear wire in Belden twisted pair cable as the signal wire (+) and others use it as the common (-).

If I have service it, I put a short length of red heat shrink on whichever is plus because my memory is poor and I grew up fixing cars where red was (+). Works for me.

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All of your suggestions have been great so far in my opinion, I'm going to look into getting some of the things that you mentioned that would help out on troubleshooting calls.

250 feet of shielded twisted pair (STP)

I don't routinely carry it, but I have a roll of about 250 feet of Belden 20g shielded, twisted pair.

It's come up in the commissioning of a new field transmitter that "your box doesn't work", and in both cases this happened in crappy 100 year old plants. I went out laid the Belden cable out on the floor and connected the end points and voila, the transmitter works when cabled properly; proving that there's wiring problems somewhere along the existing path. I'm not an electrician, so I get to leave it up to the client as to how they resolve it. But the problem isn't on my end.

Not a bad idea to be able to make your own RG45 cables that you can leave behind.

250 ohms with alligator clips

This goes with my DVM, I use it so often: