Spec me a cable tester

Gregry254

Gregry254

Gregry254

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Looking to get a new cable tester for work with a limit of £2,500 to spend.

I spoke to our Cisco partner who told me to spend £7k on a Fluke device because you get what you pay for...

Requirments are to test both ethernet as well as fibre and have the tone device/wand to find cables on the other end, happy for these to be seperate devices if that is a better option. Cabling is all 1gb at the moment but if possible would like the device to do multi gig for future use.
 
Just to test.

Would be good to see what the issue is with the cable and how far down the cable the issue is.

At the moment we are using a cheap tester that flashes the cables from 1-8 on both ends of the ethernet and a glorified laser pen that fires light down the fibre but we are looking for something more substantial.
 
bledd said:
Ideal navitech


Have one in work, it's a very handy tool.

Would love a Fluke, but £££
Click to expand...

That one tests fibre too by the looks of it?

Think we have settled on the Fluke "LIQ-KIT" and accepted that shining a fancy laser pen down the fibre will do for now. Its really not that often we mess with the fibre.
 
IDEAL Networks, well, now TREND Networks are the best bang for buck. From memory, a lot of the TREND stuff is only Gigabit but it's been a while since I bought any as we're a Fluke household.

The LinkIQ you mention is the replacement for the old CableIQ, it's a great bit of kit.

From memory that would be a verification tester, it will verify that a cable meets the requirements as laid out in the relevant standard (EN 50173 for example), a certification tester would be the next step up but you're looking at tens of thousands and that effectively needs calibrating and will certify a cable meets requirements, that's what we would use following an install.

e; If you can stretch, this would do you, they work with pretty much all transceivers so just grab some from FS.com, if you drop me a DM I can pass you an e-mail address of one of their guys who may be able to point you in the direction of someone https://www.trend-networks.com/product/signaltek-10g/
 
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Gregry254 said:
That one tests fibre too by the looks of it?
Click to expand...

No, it has an SFP module so it can test that the network part of a fibre is working, it won't show you anything above what the DOM on the SFP can do. If you want to do OTDR things like break detection then you probably want a tool designed for that job alone.

The Navitek range is more of a troubleshooter, it's not really any different to carrying a laptop around with the right model of Intel NIC in that can do cable tests - it's just a more practical form factor. It will do things like tell you if there's PoE on a link, what DHCP server it's seen etc.

If you just want a cable tester then you don't need to go up to £2500, I think the Fluke Networks LIQ-100 probably does what you need, but it's copper only. Get a cheap OTDR from FS.com as well if you need to do fibre.

Fibre is a tricky one because to a point if the light is getting to the other end then you're golden, and you have to spend quite a lot before you're getting anything more useful than the SFPs on your switches telling you what their received power levels are. Do you have loads of installed fibre that you need to maintain? What are you hoping to *do* with the knowledge that you have a break 350m down a fibre pair? If you don't have the tools to pull a bundle back and splice it into a joint closure then buying things like OTDRs are a bit pointless. I'd buy a couple of cheap light sources and some one-click cleaners and hold off on anything more advanced until there was money for a fusion splicer and a training course.

My approach with fibre is always to put in more than you're planning to use right away so that if you break one it doesn't matter, and for tricky runs spend the time putting conduit in so you can just pull a new one through if it gets properly smashed up. You'd have to break a lot of fibre before you broke even with expensive test tools, and if you are in a position to design the cable routes and containment then you shouldn't really break anything except the bits at the end, which are pretty obvious to spot.
 
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Thanks for the input all.

The LIQ-100 is what we are going for as part of the LIQ-KIT which also includes the intelitone wand and 7 remote ID's.

For background I work in a large entertainment venue which has fibre runs from the server room to 28 comms rooms. There are 40 fibre runs (20 run in different directions around the bilding) to each comms room but we only use a max of 4, so plenty of spares. Usually there is no need to touch/test the fibre but we have had a few productions who want to make use of our fibre infrastructure and its good to prove its fine before handing it over.

Turns out our flexoptic box can do some basic tests on the fibre and show light being received/send light in the oposite direction so that will do for now on the fibre side.
 
If you're an entertainment venue then for the fibre runs that external parties use you might want to look at something like the Neutrik opticalCON power monitor
 
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