Real-time dynamic substructuring tests have been conducted on a cable-deck system. The cable is representative of a full scale cable for a cable-stayed bridge and it interacts with a deck, numerically modelled as a single-degree-of-freedom system. The purpose of exciting the inclined cable at the bottom is to identify its nonlinear dynamics and to mark the stability boundary of the semi-trivial solution. The latter physically corresponds to the point at which the cable starts to have an out-of-plane response when both input and previous response were in-plane. The numerical and the physical parts of the system interact through a transfer system, which is an actuator, and the input signal generated by the numerical model is assumed to interact instantaneously with the system. However, only an ideal system manifests a perfect correspondence between the desired signal and the applied signal. In fact, the transfer system introduces into the desired input signal a delay, which considerably affects the feedback force that, in turn, is processed to generate a new input. The effectiveness of the control algorithm is measured by using the synchronization technique, while the online adaptive forward prediction algorithm is used to compensate for the delay error, which is present in the performed tests. The response of the cable interacting with the deck has been experimentally observed, both in the presence of delay and when delay is compensated for, and it has been compared with the analytical model. The effects of the interface delay in real-time dynamic substructuring tests conducted on the cable-deck system are extensively discussed.