Using a mains power detector along the cable didn’t work for Richard from the LearnElectronics YouTube channel, so he tried a second method based on the capacitance of the wires in the cable to find a break in a charging cable.
Assuming the break is on a single conductor in the cable, treating two wires in the cable as the electrodes of a capacitor makes the broken wire shorter, so it will have less capacitance, and this can be detected and used to find the break in the wire.
While it is not a highly accurate science, it does provide an approximate location, and is another approach to try when a cable is suspected to have a broken conductor, other than simply sending a high frequency down the line and using a scope to detect a break.
