 So we got our Fluke meter here, you know, doing the tests. Ali, is this the dumbest wiring thing you've ever seen? Yes. Take a look. This, I mean, we actually got it to pass. We're going to fix it right. But I've seen some stuff, but this is a, we wanted to test a Fluke once we got here. Still this and this were inside of this. Yeah, you didn't realize it. They actually had it all crammed inside the box. So it's impressive. I've not seen this level of silly going on in a while. But we're doing a video for the Fluke, but this is, we didn't realize the wiring was as bad at this particular location. Tom here from Orange Systems and this is a Fluke Link IQ. The Link IQ is a cable testing device, not a cable certifier. So I want to say that right up front. The next thing I want to say is Fluke did send this to me for demo. We took it out in the field and we bounced it off a couple of things and it did fall maybe once. It's not too scuffed up, but that happens and tools should be able to survive it. I'm not certifying it exactly how far you can drop this from and not have a problem. That's not really the point of my channel, but we do take things out in the field before we review them. Fluke sent this to me a few months ago. So I've been kind of sitting on the review and they asked me to do a review right away and I said I can't because I didn't test it. I mean, I am positive it does everything like the demo video says and everything under website says. Fluke makes a pretty reliable set of products. For example, I have my old Fluke meter here that I've had since I've owned my electronics shop and well, this has certainly fallen many times and has had the batteries swapped a few times and still perfectly measures electricity exactly as I expected to. I've always found their products be very just reliable and well built. Their network test equipment is well regarded in the industry for when you're doing low voltage cabling that you can get a reliable result out of the Fluke. Now, this device right here being less than a cable certifier but still having some of the good features you want might make it a little bit of a time saver. And one of the reasons we had it for so long is because we spent time out in the field with it. Specifically, we did a lot of testing at a school which I'll share some footage from. One of the really handy things is being able to figure out when you're troubleshooting networks, the active network by providing the connected switch information for each switch port number and VLAN ID. This was invaluable for time saving when you go to places that don't have good labeling. Now, you'd be shocked to learn at a school had pad labeling, right? Multiple IDF rooms on each floor which means if you're anywhere close to those IDF rooms you might know where that wire goes but you might be wrong because someone didn't realize there's an IDF room 20 feet away and went to the one a hundred feet away because we didn't wire it and I don't have any reasons why that was done. What we did find though was plugging these in pulling down cameras and figuring out exactly what Cisco switch it was plugged into which thankfully were labeled. We physically knew which Cisco switch based on its name because in its name included the IDF room number was invaluable for a time saving not having to have people run back and forth. I mean, yes, we know how to tone cables and find them but this scales up. And unfortunately if you didn't realize labor rates are actually kind of high to pay a bunch of people or run around the building chasing wires. So having this being able to label and do this was great because we're able to actually label as we found Jacks that had problems. We were able to identify what switch they went to what port they were in and then put a label on it. And once we knew what port they were in we could then cross reference that information in the IDF room and start building documentation from well an undocumented mess. Now this will also troubleshoot POE devices. This is a nice thing because it does load testing on POE. So we'd actually found that to be helpful if you had a camera that's out you could not sure if it's the camera is it the switch is the POE turned off. And sometimes it was as simple as the POE was turned off or other times we don't know why the POE port went bad on something or just the camera's bad. But being able before you just plug another camera in and hope it comes on and troubleshoot if you could plug this in know where it goes label where it goes and put in our label on that wire and also have a POE load tests. So we'd see all the different loads come through and this will do the load testing on there. Now the next thing for troubleshooting was the graphical wire map and length. So per wire test to identify the common faults that occur is where the break is is the break because someone didn't crimp it right. That's a common one for just a bad crimp, bad punch down or is it somewhere in between? What if someone only partially cut a wire part way in between and therefore when you run the length test because it tells you the length of each wire you end up with all the wires going to the length of the to the end where the punch down is and finding it there and say, oh no, no one of them is just not paired or crossed or crimped wrong or crimped miswired or did something get cut in between. So we have a hundred feet of cable but at the 50 foot mark two pair are broken. This is where this comes really handy when you're doing the troubleshooting like that. Now the other thing you can do is measure past the 300 foot one meter standard for most of your category six cable. It can actually go all the way up to 1,000 feet or 300 meters. This is great because well maybe it doesn't work because someone ran it way longer than they should have and out of spec. I know you can get away with some things being out of spec. Obviously they won't pass certification but at least you'll know someone just decided to extend the cable well beyond that length that you expected it to be which was the let's say 300 feet and you'll find it at 500 feet. And there are exceptions. I've covered game changer cable on here that does go longer than the 300 feet normal limit or a hundred meter normal limit but at least you should know and the cable will be able to be measured with this that's further. Let's take a little bit closer look at what you get in a package. So in the package itself you get this handy carrying case you get some adapters for international plugs USB-C charging. Man, I like that this is USB-C. That's huge to me. You get a little coupler at the end and then you get remote ID one. Now they sell larger kits to have more remote IDs. The remote ID is when you plug these in it's going to do the testing from either the cable or the port. That's why they have the adapter in here and it will tell me whether or not this cable is going to pass or fail at all the design tests. You know, I have it by the left at the default and we just hit auto test and we actually can watch the cable go all the way up. It's gonna test all the wires and then go through a test. Yay, look, this cable's cat six and can run up to 10 gig because of its short length. No, not cat six A. This is cat six, but due to a short length it will pass at the 10 gig mark. So that's great. And if we were testing this inside of a port without a switch plugged into it it's nice to be able to have it do that test and let us know that piece of information. Now that aside, let's actually take a little bit closer look at the device. And this is where it's just really handy. We're gonna actually go ahead and do you want to test results, save or X without saving cancel and we can just hit save as it's gonna increment it says YouTube here, test O8 and then Tom we have the operator in there results saved. Now if we flip this onto the side as I said, there's a plug here for USPC and a network jack on the end. That's really not much else. There is a easy to get out to battery that you can pop this out. It's a proprietary battery that you can get from fluke but it's rechargeable, obviously. And I'm impressed. We've been using this a lot and there's still quite a bit of battery left on here. Which really lasted a long time. Now let's actually do a little bit of testing here. And I'm holding here a Cisco Catalyst 1000 series switch. We're gonna actually put this in and see what we get as a test on this. This is a PoE switch. I've reviewed this switch before and I chose a Cisco one because I wanted to show you the difference between Cisco and we've tried a couple other ones but not a hundred percent of them will give us the VLAN. And let me explain. So we have plugged in Cisco and we're just gonna hit auto test and leaving everything at auto test without the options at the fault pretty safe bet to get what you're looking for out of here. It's gonna do the test because it's plugged into a switch even though we just passed this cable for up to 10 gig. The switch is not 10 gig. So it's gonna tell you everything that it can negotiate that it's gonna go test the wiring on here and it's gonna tell us all the pairs. So testing PoE right now. And it's doing this in real time. I'm not speeding this up so we can see exactly how long the test takes. By the way, Cisco 8 PoE VLAN 1. The advertised speeds on a switch and it's doing a load test. I don't think the clicking it makes comes true. There's a little bit of a click noise that comes out of here when it does the load test. It's still waiting. There we go. We know this will do 13 watt, 50 volts under load. Under load is important. That's one of the reasons it clicks. It's actually putting this under load and then we can hit save this information. You notice just the name is generic Cisco 8 PoE but we do have gigabyte ethernet 2 slash zero. We have the Cisco ports save as and we've got this test ID nine. You can edit each one of these to put a little bit more information in but let's hit okay. Now we're gonna plug it in to one of my unified PoE switches. Gonna do the same thing. We're gonna hit the auto test on the unified PoE switch. It's getting the details, pulling it on. Studio 26, that is the name and it is actually named port one. And now it's gonna do the PoE test. All right, same thing. 42 and a half volt minimum, 48 under load. So once again, we did a loaded PoE test. So we understand what voltages come out of there. We show the wires that it's working on and everything's good. We'll go ahead and save as and just hit save again. Now I'm gonna plug it into a port that I labeled and gave it a name. Hit the auto test again. And now you can see it says port three, Tom's port, studio 26 port switch. So the name of the switch is right, Tom's port but what's still blank is the VLAN information. This is something I found interesting because the Cisco where I got the VLAN information right away on the Unify, I didn't. But that's not absolutely consistent. And sometimes the Unify would give me the information on different switches, but not from others. I'm not sure why it's just not sharing that information but that was a little bit of a puzzle that I did run into. So it does depend on the switch and whether or not the switch coughs up that information essentially to be able to get it. So I will warn that that can still be a little bit of an issue. It seemed absolutely consistent when we tested them at the school with a variety of old and new Cisco equipment we have there. It worked consistently on my Cisco Catalyst 1000 I have here on my table. But we did notice trying it on a few different switches, some different Unify and Edge switches that it didn't always cough up the VLAN information and just gave us the port and the name of the switch. But still, that's a pretty good piece of information I have. Now, as far as the value of this, I want to address that as in, should you buy it? And I know that question comes up when you have anything expensive. I think Fluke makes really nice stuff. I'm not saying that because they sent this to me. This is still my own opinion. And I don't feel like that would be something I'm worried about with a device. Not that I'm dropping it from very far. I don't know if I'll do any larger drop tests with it. But I think Fluke makes a solid device. They make something that's very reliable, very consistent. But when it comes down to the kit, I think getting it with just one little adapter for testing probably isn't adequate. You'd actually save more time by buying their only slightly larger kit that I've seen for sale that has this along with a handful of these remote IDs. So when you're doing a wiring job, you want to go and test each one of your label and wires. You can go through, plug a few of these in in the back and then run through and test all the locations and then produce your labels and then know each one of these was tested and then even save this out as a report if you wanted to. Not the same as a certification report, but at least document that it was done. Also, if you have a lesser skilled and staff member that you're the trainee, the apprentice, it's easy for them to just press auto and hit save. And you don't have to wonder about the results. You can go back and review all the results that are in here. And it saves up to 999 results before you have to start over. Plus you can label them by project right here to make it really easy to sort. So I think this can be a time saver. You get it with the toner because the fact that it does the toning too is pretty cool. I will leave you with some of the message tones that it'll play as we roll out the video here and I'll leave links to everything I talked about, including if you wanna poke at this a little bit yourself, they have a website that has a virtual demo so you can kind of take a closer look at it. All right, links to everything I talked about down below and thank you for Fluke to send this out so I can do this review. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. 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