F02 Underground Cable Locator, Wire Tracer with Earphone, Cable Tester for Dog Fence Cables Irrigation Control Wires

I was skeptical but had a broken dog fence wire. We have about 400' of underground of underground 10 gauge wire and had to try something. I ordered this and watch many you tube videos as well. With fence unplugged, I disconnected the 2 wires from the fence controller and hook on the red and black clips to those. I traced the wire around the whole yard twice and found one area about 10' long where the signal went dead. That took about 20 mins. Marked it with flags, Then I dug in this area, found the wire and found the break within about 3' of where I started digging. Literally took me about 10 mins. Total success!!. I would have never thought this product would solve my problem in 30 mins. A clear winner in my book.

This worked like a snap to track my underground electric feed from the house to the garage! I just disconnected both ends of the line and connected the transmitter to the middle, and then walked around with the receiver and made a beautiful flag line! I then did the same for our well water/electric which was quite a bit deeper and a bit harder to follow, but we have the general line for that as well now. We live in very sandy soil that drains well, if that matters.

First, the description isn't clear, but this unit _does_ "null" (no sound) directly over the cable. Due to the physics of loop antennas and radiation and such it a much more accurate way to locate because the signal will increase gradually so it is not a sharp point when directly over the cable. The loop antenna has very steep sides to the null, so my experience is the antenna can pick up the buried cable over range of more than a meter (4 ft) and the null spot is generally about 10 cm (4 inches) wide.The transmitter (stationary unit) has a transmit power knob, which teams up with the RF signal strength knob on the receiver (portable unit) to adjust for changing conditions, cable lengths, ground depth, soil type, etc. If the signal is too strong, it can be hard to find the null. If it is too weak, it can be hard to find. So if it isn't working well for you try changing either or both.NOTE: The knob on the receiver is NOT a volume control!!! The volume of the "beep" is not adjustable. That knob is to adjust the sensitivity, not how loud the beep is.I have not used any high-price, DigRite type gear, but this one does require a bit of skill from the operator. I has worked for me is to set up the transmitter and start locating right there. Swing the antenna (knob at the end of the wire) around, sniffing for signal. Oh, it seems the wire is also part of the antenna and if the wire is not straight the results can be unpredictable. Once I get a null that I think might be the cable, I get the antenna swinging gently over the null, about 20-30 cm (8-12 inches) on each swing. Walking forward, I change direction to keep tone strong at each end of the swing and the low point of the swing centered on the null. Usually I'm wanting to mark, so I paint every so often.I was able to identify breaks in a 20 AWG tracer wire on a fiber cable buried 30-60 cm deep (1-2 feet).Another trick I have found useful is to rig the antenna knob so it hangs with the _side_ down, not the tip. I'm using a piece of 24 AWG network cable to hold it parallel to the ground and still hang. Now it does not null swinging over the buried cable - but it does null when the antenna is pointing parallel to it. It gets confused with tight turns and coils, but can be helpful to know approx which direction the lost cable is going.I don't need to do this sort of thing very often, so it's hard to justify thousands of dollars. So I'm mighty pleased at the capability of this little fellow. I also use dowsing rods, which I find quite useful, but I'm also not able to distinguish a gutter drain from a fiber optic cable from the power main. With this, I was confident which one was the trace wire on the fiber.

I had such high hopes for this product but it works so poorly that I am wondering how many of the high star reviews are real.I received this and opened the box. It comes in a nice thick nylon sheath/carrying case that is awkwardly sized to hold the two pieces of the detector. Batteries are included, but not installed. Despite the box advertising that the included batteries are lithium, they are just regular 9 volt lead acid batteries.I read the instructions front to back, they have some laughable phrases that must have been lost in translation, and they are very poor. They advised to “set the wheel to high tone” and nowhere in the manual does it say which direction high tone is.Regardless, the device is pretty simple and I followed the instructions to a t. Initially it seemed to work and I traced an underground dog fence wire across my yard about 50 ft. The line went under a driveway and the device went silent. I knew where it came out on the other side of the driveway, but the device just seemed completely unable to pick it Up. I had to dig a hole on that side of the driveway crossing and strip the wire underground and set the device up again on that side of the driveway crossing. Again, was off to a good shaft tracing where I knew the wire was, but it just stopped beeping and could not find the wire again. I ultimately dug up a lot of hard to locate the wire again and even then had to keep digging the length of the wire to find the broken end.I had a flower bed dug out with a tractor and knew at least 3’ of wire was missing, so I hooked up to the other wire and began trying to trace it and experienced the exact same thing on the other side. I tried every trick they suggest, pounding grounding stakes 3’ into the ground and pouring water around them, etc, but it just didn’t work. I ended up digging a lot of holes and eventually finding the wire, then digging up 20 ft of the wire to finally find the other side of the break.The only way I’d say this meter helped at all was when I knew where the wire was, I could cup a hand over the sensor and press or against the ground and it would sometimes but not always change tone to help guide the exact spot I had to dig.This device claims it’s made to find underground dog fence wires up to 3’ deep. Mine was 5” deep or less and it simply didn’t work as advertised. I’m returning it for a refund. It doesn’t work well enough to be of any value in keeping. Very disappointed.