Cabling Chronicles
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
January 16, 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
December 12, 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
Troubleshooting Fiber on the Cheap
If you troubleshoot fiber on a regular basis, you probably have an array of tools to help you do the job, including an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. But we often get questions from customers who don’t troubleshoot fiber enough to justify such an expensive tool.
November 21, 2019
The Poet’s Guide to the Physics of Twisted Pair Cabling
I once took a class where the professor would explain concepts in two ways. First, he would dive into the mathematics behind the idea, filling the whiteboard with equations and showing how they all related to one another. He tagged this “for the engineers”. Then, he would explain the concept again, but this time, with no math at all. This he said, was “for the poets”.
November 14, 2019
