tonight i'm wetting my whistle with juice of the oats oatmeal stout from oxus brewing in Winnipeg
they describe it as an easy drinking dark ale with the aroma of coffee and chocolate
all right that's the formalities out of the way now let's get to what we're actually here for
i am looking at the latest of the tools or pieces of test equipment that i have managed to convince
banggood to send me to stock up my shop oh and i guess promote the product but mostly
because i'm trying to get uh sponsors to stock my shop with tools
this is a cat5cat6 coaxial cable tester there's a certain amount of information on
the back but i think it's much more interesting to actually look at the device so let's do that
first thing out of the box it comes in this nice little zipper case that's kind of cool
instructions so look at that later and we have a damaged in shipping female to female adapter
i think those are yeah that just comes back together cool over heading quality certification
woohoo let's just dig into here uh first of all we got a bnc to two conductor rj11 so telephone jack
you have uh rj11 to clips you have a couple of rj45 cables uh they are straight through
so when you're using this type of flat cable the conductors just go straight across from end to end
so in order to have the conductor show up in order for it to be a straight through cable the ends
have to be like that or like that it looks like it's weird but that's intentional so that it's
straight through next we have a cheap little set of earbuds that's interesting what else do we have
here looks like a usb cable i'm assuming that is for charging it because it also comes with this
little usb charger here 100 to 240 volts in five volts one amp out just a basic little usb charger
then there's that thing which just allows you to couple
oh well it's not rj45 that is rj11 okay let's look at one of these cable map boxes there's four of
them comes with it this one happens to be number three and it's got a bnc on one end and it's got
the rj45 connector on the other end anyway there are four of those comes in the kit
each one has its own number on it and that's the number that it will identify itself as when
it's talking to the main unit next we have the little non-contact probe it's kind of nice that
it's got that aha there is where the headphones go and it has a charge port on the side of it
it has a 1400 milliamp hour 3.7 volt lithium belt battery in it okay it's got some charge to it
um so that is the just the pickup sensitivity oh it's got a little light on it too
that's kind of nice and then the main attraction
this is the nf-858c from noyapa whoever that is
it has a charge port on the side there's another battery compartment there same 1400 milliamp hour
3.74 battery on the side we have an rg45 scan connector and a port flash connector
on the top we have an rj45 we have a bnc we have a vfl what is vfl oh is that a fiber connector
really i'll check on that in a second okay let's see if this one's got some charge in it
yeah it does welcome to choose neufa so our options are continuity length and scan
setting language english okay backlight auto off contrast version back
back
let's see what vfl is is that really a fiber connection
oh yeah it's a fiber tester's uh best friend it's the ruby red laser oh not laser ruby red light
so i think i showed that when i was playing with a fiber tool earlier that actually so you
connect that to a fiber any fiber it looks like that will work with uh sc or ft or that size of
fiber which is pretty common and it just shines visible light down so you can easily find the
other end that's great so it'll test power over ethernet it'll test do flash whatever that is
does telephone testing and scan and length and continuity oh wow oh wait a minute scan
i know what scan is scan is creating something that this guy can listen to
so when it gets close okay so scan comes out of that one there
all right um let me set up a quick demonstration i think
okay so picture a situation where you've got a bundle of wires just running through a ceiling you
know where one end of them is in your land room or whatever but you're not sure where they go you
you just want to sort of follow them and i mean it's easy in this instance because i've got three
different colored wires but if they're all the same color which they often are in an installation
and if you get some distance away from the cables and you can't tell anymore which one they are
it's that one and again this this makes a lot more sense when you've got a bundle of dozens of cables
and they're all the same same color and everything else but yeah that is just a super quick way of
following a wire through random places super handy thing to have another feature that looks handy is
cable length especially if you have to run additional cables into a place we've already
got one run you can just quickly scan and find the length of the thing so that i assume comes
off there notice i'm not using the manual at all yet i've used tools similar to this at work so i'm
familiar relatively with how it works but i'm just i'm just going to see how far i can get to with no
no reference to the manual so i'll push the okay type cat5 sure uh units meters sure
calibration not worrying about that right now low
data not worrying about that right now so let's just start and see what happens
so it says that pair 1 is open pair 2 is 6.8 meters pair 3 is 4.9 meters and pair
4 is 4.4 meters so i'm not sure why pair one is showing is open but the reason that there's
different lengths in the pairs is cat 5 and cat6 and all these data cables are
twisted pairs each of the four pairs of wires is twisted to help reject outside interference
allow me to show you notice that the blue has the most twists per unit length and the
i think that's the brown has the least and then orange and green are again a little bit different
so in this case probably the blue pair blue white pair is going to be the longest pair in the in
the cable just because it goes extra distance so don't be alarmed if you see that it's got
different lengths for each pair inside the same jacket that's correct so i figured out what the uh
what one of the use cases is for this whole set of adapters here um you can get into
clip leads like this through the coax and clip them onto a wire going into a bundle
for doing the cable locate this the same way i probably should have showed one of the more basic
modes that most people would use every day on this thing before i started showing the fancy features
but anyway the continuity mode so we're connected again to the receiver continuity mute okay
i've just got it set for cat five again start and it just shows that the eight conductors
are all connected and connected straight through which is good uh receiver and master right however
if you connect a different cable to it wire one connects to wire three wire two connects to
wire six wire six connects to wire two wire one connects to wire three that is what's called a
crossover cable it's a little bit old-school it's almost never used these days although there are
some older pieces of equipment that still require it unless i've got this cable marked as crossover
so the telephone mode would again be using this little adapter onto here because
normal telephony for old style landline just uses two conductors which are the middle two on there
and then telephone mode it gives you the status of the line i don't have a landline here so i
can't test that i'm assuming it will say on hook off hook or ringing and there it will tell you
the polarity and voltage of the line which would typically be in the 48 volts range plus or minus
somewhere between 40 and 50 volts typically for just a normal off hook telephone
but if you're doing uh work on landlording telephones that's handy
i'll come back to flash after i read the manual we have a power over ethernet or poe mode here
which i'm assuming will tell you the voltage that it sees on each of the wires if there is
poe connected but as i mentioned i don't have anything poe in the building so we'll deal with
that later vfl we looked at that that's visual fault locator or visual fiber locator that's
a fiber connector underneath there record okay so if you're doing wire mapping and stuff then
it will uh record that okay settings aha i have found what that port flash function means
you can connect this guy to a port on an existing switch an ethernet switch and it will light up
the port light on it without actually generating any traffic or causing problems you can do either
the uh normal mode or a poe version okay so there is my shop computer's router and just to
you know wi-fi for my shop i've got this guy in flash mode i'm connected to the flash port
notice port 4 on the router just before the lcd blinks on the screen of my meter here
that's one of those not going to use it very often or at least i'm not but probably could
come in really handy so the only one well the the only one that i'm interested in that we
haven't played with yet is wire map so let me just play with that a little bit off camera
all right i've got these four wire map boxes connected up to random cables here then we go into
continuity mode i'll just stick with cat5 right now these are all cat5e cables so that should
be fine i'm going to continuity mode now before i head in one to one when i was using this guy
but now i'm going to take it into one to four mode and scroll down and hit start
and it identifies that this cable is connected to remote three
which is this one and
that it is wired as a straight through cable so let's try a different one let's try this one here
and that's remote two um let's try this blue cable here
oh you saw what i've got connected to it let's see if it'll do it yep it shows up as remote four
that one oh hey the beeping pattern changes and it also shows that it is huh
that's interesting it showed up as the as the crossover cable like it should
but for some reason there's two pairs missing why is it not seeing those two pairs
because we know these pairs do work when we tested it with this huh that's interesting
and just for completeness we'll test it with that one which should be number one and it is and that
wire map mode is actually the main reason that i wanted this rather than a more basic tester
because i think i mentioned that i've got a new garage built and i ran some uh some cat5e through
conduit out to the garage while you know while the electricians at the trench open why not right
um but me being you know in a hurry and lazy i didn't bother marking them so
the whole reason for uh for choosing this one next the last time ben good said hey
do you want some stuff was to get this wire map functionality so that i can map those out
okay so here we are in the land closet of my house yes it's literally a closet in the basement
and there's the two new cables that i ran out to the garage and terminated i'll just plug
wire mapper number one and two onto those guys and then let's go to the garage and see if we can see
them and see if i wired it right okay here we are out in the garage and as you can see i've got my
two cat5e runs into a jack that i hooked up earlier in the year um and also got some rg6
out here just because you never know anyway let's fire this guy up into continuity mode
uh we're going one to one mode no we need to be in one to four mode right
and start and we'll plug it into the bottom one and see what happens and that is remote number
one on the bottom perfect and it's wired straight through with no errors nice and then the top one
and that's remote number two okay so i can identify these and i can only plug in the
one that i need or i can label them at the other end so i know which is which perfect
and that means i can take my used thrift store router here and hook it up
onto the keyhole slots there and then we'll go from this port one sure why not
now this is a router but it's also got a switch built into it i'm using it as a switch so i'm
going to plug into one of the four switch ports back to the switch in the house i'm not going to
use the rotor port because i'm just going to use the rotor in the house to be in charge out here
there we go lance what are you talking about out there
oh you're just coming to see what i'm doing so we'll just take a quick look at banggood's
sale page for this unit um i will put a link down in the description and if banggood comes
through with the discount code that they often do i will put that down there as well it is currently
on sale for 89.99 anyway the regular price is usd 129.99 so here is the basic specs of the thing
and this is pretty much copied straight out of the manual as well you can come and take a peek if you
were interested max testing range 2 000 meters 2 kilometers the battery is actually better than the
one that they spec which is nice and yeah there's what you get in the kit plus a bunch of cables and
adapters and things and there is the various functions so there's one of the things that
i'm not able to demonstrate because i don't have a poe switch here but it will show you the voltages
coming in over the poe line so that's handy for checking and that's the other thing that
i don't have anything to test right now is the visual fault locator so basically that
just punches that red light down the fiber and you can see it blinking at the far end and it
really does jump out at you too if you've got a bundle of unknown fiber it's really easy to see
so there we go just a quick look and test and run through its paces of this noiafa nf 85hc
cable tester measurer cable links cable mapping very cool little uh piece of kit um
i mean there are cheaper ones available like this little one that i have had forever but the
wire mapping feature and this uh non-contact tracing mode are super duper handy things to
have and those i think are the things that i'm going to use the absolute most on this
um in addition to just verifying that i wired things correctly thanks to banggood
for sending this out for me and uh you know continuing to stock up my tool chest
thanks to you guys for watching questions and comments down below as usual um there will be
a link in the description to this thing in case anybody's interested i will talk to you later