Conventional structural cables (or wire ropes) are composed of steel wires helically wound into strands, which, in turn, are wound around a core. Cables made from shape memory alloy (SMA) wires are a new structural element with promising properties for a broad range of new applications. Among the many potential advantages of this form are increased bending flexibility for spooling/packaging, better fatigue performance, energy absorption and damping, reduced thermal lag, redundancy, and significant design flexibility. Currently there are very few studies of SMA cables in the literature, so exploratory thermomechanical experiments were performed on two commercially available cable designs. Tensile tests were performed on the individual strands and wires that make up the two cable designs, so as to see the impact of each level in the cable construction. Special attention was paid to the propagation of phase transformation fronts, using full field infrared imaging and digital image correlation. These imaging techniques revealed significantly different front propagation behavior in the two cable designs, in the components of each cable design, and at different strain rates on the same cable design. This study is part of an ongoing research program to systematically characterize SMA cables' thermomechanical behavior and demonstrate their potential utility as adaptive or resilient tension elements.