Videos: Defective USB Cable

When I had issues with my portapack, it took me some time to remark that these issues only happened with a particular USB cable.

The SDR would work fine, and then when I would try to record or playback, the screen would turn dark.

You can see this in the following video:

What is happening, is that this particular USB cable is electrically defective: the voltage drop is too large, due to the abnormally high resistance of the cable. The portapack doesn’t receive enough power, and starts to malfunction.

In the following 2 videos, I perform various tests with that defective cable:

Videos on my video blog (with some info on the devices I used):

Article Link: https://blog.didierstevens.com/2020/08/02/videos-defective-usb-cable/