The knowledge of soil water content is important for agriculture, mainly the determination of its changes in the soil profile in order to optimize irrigation management. The tendency to use the technique of TDR (Time Domain Reflectometry) to measure the soil water content is relatively new in Brazil. To help the diffusion of this technique, the objective of this work was to study the possibility of using multi-wire probes with electrical impedance discontinuities in TDR equipment. The experiment was divided in to two parts. In the first one, the laboratory performance of two multi-wire probe configurations was studied; and in the second one, the evaluation of the probe reliability to monitor water content changes in porous media. The viability of the use of multi-wire probes to estimate the water content in the porous media profile was confirmed. However, the use of a probe with 0.10 m segmentation was limited to the soil depth of 0.40 m, due to the difficulty to interpret the impedance peaks at the extremity.
time domain reflectometry; wave guide; water management
