Cabling Chronicles

Get in the Know at the BICSI Winter Conference!

Planning to attend the upcoming BICSI Winter Conference & Exhibition on February 9-13 at the Tampa Bay Convention Center in Tampa, FL?

Fluke Networks is offering plenty of educational opportunities to learn all about fiber, Industrial Ethernet and more.  And you can stop by the Fluke Networks’ Booth #310 during exhibiting hall hours for hands-on demonstrations and one-on-one time with our experts.

February 6, 2020

What Went Wrong with the Insertion Loss?

Have you ever carefully calculated insertion loss during the design phase and then passed your permanent link testing after installation only to find out that the channel isn’t performing once it went live?

January 30, 2020

Sometimes…It’s the Cable

There’s an ad that says, “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.”  With billions of links certified by our testers and something like five more every second of every business day, we’ve seen just about every possible cabling problem.  Which means we’ve seen plenty of bad cable.

January 23, 2020

History of the RJ45: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Our industry commonly uses the term “RJ45” to refer to the modular 8-position, 8-contact (8P8C) interface deployed for Ethernet over copper twisted-pair network cabling despite it pretty much being a case of mistaken identity.

But since the RJ45 name has stuck, we thought maybe we’d take a closer look at the history of this nomenclature and why to this day, it remains the de facto interface for twisted-pair Ethernet applications.

January 2, 2020

Cable Testing 101: What’s My Loss Budget?

While you might hear your CFO grumbling about staying under budget from a dollar perspective, staying under your loss budget from a fiber perspective has a much bigger impact on your network performance – which ultimately impacts your bottom line by avoiding downtime.

But how exactly is your loss budget defined and how do you ensure you don’t exceed it?

December 26, 2019

This Decade’s Top 5 Tech Flicks for Your Holiday Downtime

As we head into the holidays and a new decade, you may find that you’ve finally got some time to wind down at home as you use up the remainder of this year’s vacation days. And even if you’re stuck in the office keeping the network up and running, it’s a quiet time of year that might warrant a long lunch to watch Netflix on your laptop.

December 17, 2019

Fluke Networks Previews Single Pair Ethernet Testing at Industrial Automation Show

Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) is making waves in the industrial automation world as a potential replacement for fieldbus architectures. At the recent Rockwell Automation show, Fluke Networks demonstrated a prototype Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE) adapter for the DSX-8000. 

December 5, 2019

Anixter’s New Utility Grade Infrastructure

Fluke Networks has announced support for Anixter’s Utility Grade Infrastructure.  That means that Anixter Certified UTG Integrators can use the DSX CableAnalyzer to certify their installations.  We thought we’d explore the UTG program and what it offers the marketplace.

November 30, 2019