Monday, January 7, 2019

Cable certifier - Fluke DSX vs Ideal LANTEK III - or any alternatives around $5,000 or under? (second-hand)

I am looking for something to certify copper gigabit and 10GbE lines (as well as possible fiber optics - e.g. 10GBASE-LR SFP+ - in the future).

I currently have a Fluke LRAT-2000 - this tells me if there's an obvious wiring issue with a cable (e.g. splits) , but it won't detect things like crosstalk, or badly made cables.

I'm looking around, and it seems the newer Fluke DSX-5000 is the one I want - however, it seems to be well over $10,000.

Even searching on eBay - I am having trouble finding many second-hand units. I see some people selling what they describe as the "main unit" - but I believe I then need to buy a module to test say, copper, and I can't find them sold separately.

I see there's also a IDEAL Lantek III - this seems to be under $10,000 - but I'm also having trouble finding many units for this secondhand (or am I just using the wrong search terms?)

Also - curious if anybody has experience of the two (Fluke vs Lantek) and can offer comparisons.

Are there alternatives to either of the above around the $5,000 mark, or thereabouts? I'm obviously OK with second-hand at this price-point.

I may have access to something that can do BERT (bit-error rate tests) and other network tests (e.g. Veex TX300s series) - but my understanding is that these operate at a high layer of the stack, and won't tell me if say, a cable is badly crimped down and won't transmit at 10Gb.

To clarify - we don't need to give official results to clients etc. - this is simply for ourselves, to make sure we have no cabling issues, and to save any trips to the DC.



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