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Recommend a fiber optic cable tester

Jeff7181

Jeff7181

Lifer
I'm looking to finally buy a fiber optic cable tester at work but I don't have any experience with them. Can anyone recommend a brand or even model? We use 50/125 multimode fiber with LC connectors.
 
Fluke. You can get one that does CAT certification and then there's modules for fiber. One tool. You may be surprised at the trouble you find.
 
We use the Fluke FTK1450/E kit for the basics and a DTX-1800 with various heads for just about everything you can think of. Pretty nice system.
 
spidey07 said:
It's not like they bought the market leader in the field...oh wait, they did. :awe:

About 10 years ago I think.
Click to expand...

Heh, I don't care about the name on it, they just work. Nothing like getting "There is a break in the brown pair 23 feet 6 inches from the tester." On the screen. Makes troubleshooting a cake walk, esp with multiple dead ends available. The one I had had an "8 in 1" end so you could plug 8 patches in to the patch panel at a time. More if you picked up more of the dead ends, but for me 8 tended to work well enough mostly because I could walk over the low voltage installer side and borrow 15 more dead ends if I really needed to.

We had an issue where the cheap crap network terminations (the plastics) on the cubes would fall out leaving the keystones hanging, where they would get kicked and thus broken (cable.) That and the vacuum cleaners ramming in to them.... Any way the tester would find the fault in 10 seconds or less and tell me if I had to cut 1 inch or a foot of cable from the slack in the wall.
 
Do you want a tester or a certification machine?

Are you installing fiber or just maintaining what is already installed?

For my money a certification machine is the way to go. Most if not all of the fluke DTX series have OTDR capability.
 
DainBrammage said:
Do you want a tester or a certification machine?

Are you installing fiber or just maintaining what is already installed?

For my money a certification machine is the way to go. Most if not all of the fluke DTX series have OTDR capability.
Click to expand...

I'm only looking for a tester. We have an assortment of 5-20 meter lengths of fiber that we use for cabling up servers. A good amount of it has been run, pulled back, run, pulled back and run again. It would be nice if I could just slap a tester on one of the cables and know the signal isn't going to be degraded. A break is easy enough to test with a flash light, but degradation is a little more difficult to determine.
 
You need a certifier then as it will test the bandwidth of the application. The make cheaper ones just for loss but id go for the right tool for the job.
 
Fluke is about as good as it gets, but you are going to pay out the nose for it. Just like you do for Cisco, Snap On etc.

Worth it? Thats for you to decide.....

ETA:

I think we use EXFO at work for the light meters, not sure what the OTDR is.
 
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