Originally posted by: danzig
Anyone know if this works as good as some of the more expensive ones - ie Fluke,Ideal etc. ?
LOL! Fluke is going to be like $300. I think they probably have a few more features for that price. Of course it doesn't work as good, you get what you pay for.
🙂 I got this from computer geeks along with 1000' of cat 5 cable and 100 plugs and the crimper for like $40. Basically the tester just checks to see if the wires are wired correctly. It doesn't do any speed testing (I'm guessing the more expensive ones like Fluke probably can do actual speed testing), it just checks that each wire is wired correctly (no shorts) and no missing connections.
Sure some of the labels are in chinese, but all you need to know really is that if all the lights cycle green one after another, the cable is correctly wired. If one is red, a wire is messed up. Personally I find this really handy to check to see if the cable I just made was made wrong or right.
This tester is not to check to see if you are going to get 100mbps speed out of it, only that you wired it correctly. It has a detachable end too, so you can take that over to one end and use the other part on the other end of the cable. Handy if you can't get both ends of cable together to test.
Edit: My mistake, I looked up the fluke here:
http://www.flukenetworks.com/us/Cabling/Residential+and+Basic+Testing/MicroScanner+Pro/Overview.htm
It retails for
$380 at insight direct:
http://www.insight.com/web/apps/nbs/index.php?search_type=quick&K=microscanner
So looks like I was a little low on my estimate.
🙂
Some of the features of the fluke you dont get in a <$10 tester:
Flashes hub port light
Identifies10/100 Ethernet with new Network Identification feature
Measures cable length and distance to faults via Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) technology
Test twisted pair and coax cable
Matches (UTP or coaxial) cables to offices during adds, moves and changes
Apparently you can even have it identify locations of drops and wires and stuff with little accessories that you can plug in at the patch panel.
Here's one that will test the actual speeds of the network cable and verify you can get cat 5, 5e, 6, 7 speeds out of your cable:
http://www.flukenetworks.com/us/Cabling/Copper+Cabling/OMNIScanner+LT/Overview.htm
Its only a mere
$5,742.99:
http://products.insight.com/product/Presentation/index.vm?product_id=MCT514659
