We're moving into our new 3-story bldg this week, and I've been in there prepping for the cutover. The cabling contractor had the Fluke rep come over with the new Fluke DTX-1800 and not only demo it but test all of the first floor - more than 150 drops.
The wee beasty is f-a-s-t. 12 seconds for cat 5E, and according to the rep, the same for cat6. The contractor seemed impressed, and liked it a lot. I didn't want to get nosy, so I didn't ask him if he'd fork over the $15k for one.
It has an earphone jack and an earbud earphone, just like a cell phone, so you can talk to the other end. But I asked the contractor and he said he'd rather use a pair of Moto Talkabout FRS radios instead.
The 'patch cord' that's used from the tester or remote to the wall is a special shielded cable, with a special RJ-45 plug assembly that's swappable in case it wears out. The one disadvantage I see is that this plug assembly is 5 or 6 inches long, so if you have to test behind a desk that's only a few inches from the wall, you can't get the plug into the jack. You would have to make up an extender and hope that it doesn't influence the test significantly.
The contractor had a few jacks fail, usually from the return loss test. He said that the tester was quite picky, and would detect if there was too much untwisted conductors. So he just repunched down the cable and it usually took care of the problem.
Oh, BTW, the new bldg has all Panduit wall jacks. So now I gotta stock another brand of jacks. I think our bid specs called for Avaya, but they sold to Commscope and are now called Systimax. In any case, we ended up with Panduit. I didn't hear the contractor say anything bad about Panduit, so I guess we've got that much more going for us. The bldg has ovre 300 data jacks, so it's a small but significant number of the total on the campus. But by the end of next year we should have yet another new bldg, a Library built. I hope that's not using a fourth jack mfgr(!) And then as people move out of other bldgs into this one, the remodelings will have more jacks installed. I hate to think about it..
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