As a critical member of cable-stayed bridges, stay cables play on important role of supporting the entire structure. Traffic, wind or rain-wind induced vibrations of stay cables would be a major cause of degrading both safety and serviceability of the bridge. One of the effective alternatives to solve this problem is to employ the cable dampers. In order to design the cable damper optimally, it is necessary to exactly estimate the dynamic characteristics of the existing cables. To achieve more reliable dynamic properties of stay cables, precise excitations inducing forced vibration are needed. Therefore, in this study, a cable excitation system(exciter) controlled digitally was developed. And to evaluate the performance of the cable exciter developed, a solution of the differential equation of cable motion considering the exciter was derived, Using the cable exciter, sine sweeping and resonance tests on a cable model were carried out to obtain the dynamic characteristics effectively.