Good afternoon.
My name is Jim Davis and I'm coming to you from the Fluke Networks Technical Assistance Center.
Here in lovely Everett Washington. All right,
so we have a fun story. Now when we do our installation for the first time,
we certify our cabling to make sure it meets category 5e or category 6 and
we use our DSX 8000 to do that or more likely the company that did the
installation uses their DSX 8000 to do the installation,
but after they leave, I still have to keep the network up and running.
So while I would like everyone to have a DSX 8000, please, let me introduce you
to some other products from our family.
This is going to be the MicroScanner 2 and the Cable IQ.
These products are very useful for day to day use to keep your network up and running.
Let's take a look at them in some detail.
We'll start with the MicroScanner. So I've plugged this cable into the wall,
but the user tells me that their computer is not able to connect.
Is there a problem with their computer? Is there a problem with the cabling?
Let's look and see if this cable is attached to a switch,
so I'll plug it in and I'll see little switch icon showing up here.
This is live. I'm getting an Ethernet signal on this cable. Now
what about this cable?
Let's see if it's plugged into a switch. Right away,
I don't even have to touch a button and it's telling me that this cable is open at 25 feet.
There's nothing on the far end of it.
Now from here I have a couple of options.
One is that I can put this terminator on there.
The idea of the terminator is to make sure that the pairs have been terminated
in the proper sequence and it's happy with this connection.
Now if I had a different link,
perhaps this one,
let's check and make sure that this one is terminated in the proper sequence.
Now when I connect this,
it tells me that the cable is open 96 feet away. That's very helpful.
It's not the near end.
It's the far end and if the outlet on the near end is not well labeled,
I can push the mode button here and transmitt a tone and use any inductive probe
to find where the far end of the cable is. But I want to check
what the wire map is of this cable.
So I'm going to put my wire mapping terminator on the far end.
Let's take a look at what this has to say.
Uh oh.
Trying to draw your attention with this warning triangle with an exclamation point.
The one, two and the three six pair are reversed.
Something's wrong. That's a pretty common mistake.
One end was terminated with the A T568A and the other was terminated
with T568B. We get this all day long.
It helps us to find it and we've seen how this helps to find us with opens.
All right, let's move on to the Cable IQ now
In its basic form,
the Cable IQ does exactly the same thing that the MicroScanner does.
I want to find if this cable is active,
I'm in the discover position on the knob and literally I'm not touching anything
and it's telling me it's open 29 meters away.
Now if I plug this into my network, we should get,
there we go. There's a switch and it's offering 10 and 100 megabits ethernet.
It's not offering us gigabit ethernet and that's where Cable IQ starts to be
different from MicroScanner.
Is this cable capable of supporting Gigabit Ethernet?
Let's not use my defective cable for this test.
Let's use a working cable for this test.
So I plug in,
and I'm going to change the tester from the discover position to the auto test
position and I will push test. Now just like the MicroScanner,
this was able to identify if there was a service on the line,
but what we're going to look at now is will this cable support Gigabit Ethernet?
And it's telling us, yes,
this cable is capable of supporting Gigabit Ethernet.
There's a big difference. Now the other thing that I can do,
this is a diskette icon for all your children out there.
We used to use this for saving data. I can save this,
enter some information, I'll push save again.
And from Cable IQ I can download the test results.
So sometimes I'll have somebody say,
I'm going out and I'm installing five drops in a new location,
but I want my technician to save the test results because I want to make sure he
really installed five cables. They're capable of supporting gigabit ethernet.
This is the least expensive way to do so.
Now let's have some fun because we were doing troubleshooting and we had this cable.
Now we know this cable's bad and we know that we've switched 568A
termination on one end and 568B on the other end.
Let's take a look at this other cable.
All right, so I'll plug in one end here.
Uh, here we go.
We're going to plug this end in and this end is going to the terminator because
I know that it can tell me the distance to the end of the cable
and we'll plug this end into the tester. Alright,
let's see what it has to say. Oh,
looks like we have a couple of problems here.
One of the that we have here is an open conductor. Well,
there's an obvious problem here. We do have an open conductor,
so let's go ahead and seat that conductor going to punch it down.
Now the other problem that we have here is another really common one.
See, it looks like an x. Somebody switched
the solid and the striped conductor.
These need to be reversed,
but the question that everyone asks me are they reversed on this end
or the other end? And I have a simple answer for that.
They're reversed on the other end and it's the other guy who's going to have to
unscrew the face plate. Take the connector out, punch it down.
Again,
certification with the DSX 5000 and 8000, the MicroScanner to find the
distance to where a cable is open to find out if you're running a service to be able
to tone out a cable.
Cable IQ performs the same functions of the MicroScanner and it will tell you
if your cabling is capable of supporting gigabit Ethernet and you can save the
test results. My name is Jim Davis.
Coming to you from the Fluke Networks Technical Assistant Center.
Have a good afternoon.