lol, once you get in the groove it moves fairly quickly. I actually found a box with about twice as many cables as the picture and sorted through them all.
I think I ended up with about 30% that were basically unusable (backed up by many of those giving me issues in the past), 30% were passable for basic small things and the rest were split between good cables and better cables.
The highest AWG cable I could find that is in the micro-USB category was by Anker with 20AWG power wires.
Still, 18AWG on a USB cable is mind boggling to say the least. Would be extremely good to test USB powerbanks and see if the manufacturer is padding the numbers, and not having to worry about a cable losing a ton of energy to heat.
Thanks for posting this! I just got a new phone and been researching USB type C. Studying up on chargers and cables is a must. If you go cheap or buy the wrong cable or charger you could easily brick you phone.
I’ve been testing a lot of my USB cables last night… most of them came from the factory with various USB devices that I bought.
Just about all of them seem to have fairly high resistance, aside from a Blitzwolf USB C cable I paid good money for and a 6-inch Cable Creations one - that one has low IR primarily because it’s so short.
I try to order shorter USB cables these days, to help keep IR low. I just ordered a micro USB 1.5 ft UGreen one plus another 1.5 ft one from Monoprice - I’ve seen some positive comments about them. Let’s see.
I also ordered a Ugreen cable recently and it tested good as well, although I have not actually put it into use yet, waiting for my current cable to wear out first lol.
The power supply I’m using has a voltage display, and I can see it dropping slightly under load. For example, at idle it’s at 5.26V. At 1A it’s at 5.24V. So, could I use this information in conjuction with voltage data from the DROK load tester to more accurately calculate cable resistance?
Yes, but you need a power supply that supports QC 3.0 or one without voltage cable compensation.
I’ve tested it today on my dual USB power supply featuring QC 3.0 and USB-A 2.4A, and the USB 2.4A was compensating for the voltage drop, to the point the voltage under load was higher in some instances than the idle voltage.
Testing using the QC 3.0 port netted much more accurate and reliable results.
TLDR: Find a USB port that doesn’t do voltage compensation. Techs like SmartID/VoltageBoost do this.
Edit: Looks like your USB supply does do voltage compensation. Find one that has QC 3.0, which doesn’t do cable compensation unless the protocol is activated.