I just redid my own crimping on my apartment as I wanted keystone panels instead of hardwired ones. The wires are already routed through the walls so I wasn’t going to change them, just adapt them for keystones. However, upon testing my handiwork, I only get 100mbps instead of 1gbpe - it means that not all the twisted pairs work correctly.
I want to get a tester that is not ridiculously expensive. In the past I’ve been able to use some of the Fluke equipment and they’re fantastic, but obviously out of my price range, and since I moved continents, they’re no longer available to me to borrow again. Any suggestions on what to buy to test the continuity of the individual strands?
Should’ve been more clear, I want to know what cable pair is broke. And so on, to know what to fix and where. Need to know if the other end of the cable has been wired correctly as well.
OK, I see. Well, in that case the cheapest option is manually checking each pair with a multimeter. Get yourself 2 RJ45 PCB-sockets, use one to bridge the contacts of each pair and use the tone-capabilities of the multimeter on the other to test if each pair is conductive.
Yes that Klein tester works well. I like being able to see all 8 wires listed and that it shows you exactly how the wires cross incorrectly or are open.
If it’s just a couple of wires I’d just redo it and retest? It’s probably not worth the hassle, cost, and having to store the thing to use once every few years?
If the cable worked before, and you left it and just connected to the keystone, probably just one or two of the wires are not fully in the keystone? Rather than the wire itself having a defect somewhere…
Not that I know of, as such a device needs to integrate a high speed frequency generator and receiver, and so that hardware cost more.
You should technically be able to have such a device for under $200 (as far as the hardware itself goes), as we can get a pair of new 10gb NICs for that much which means the hardware capable of creating such signals can be had in the cheaper price ranges, but as it is such a niche segment of testing only a few companies make devices for that task, and they think such a device is only used by professionals so they decide to charge large amounts of money for it. The cheapest I know of is a Fluke device for about $2000.
That is definitely NOT the cheapest option. The $5 LED based LAN cable testers can do that much, and far more quickly.
One good option to complement that is the TDR option of most managed switches. I happened to get an old 3Com PoE 10/100Mbps managed switch with the option for $15.
Other cheap options are the SC-8108 (or NF8108-M w/8 remotes) or NF-8209: