they've immediately doubled in price 😅

That, colleague!

I presume it should also be possible to locate crosstalk. I think the guy mentioned it in the vid as an issue one would have to work around when using that function, but the benefit is that perhaps (though not sure) it might be possible to intentionally seek crosstalk.

Can it locate cables in concrete walls.

@@mrtechie6810 I suppose that would depend on depth. They are quite sensitive. Probably if it’s just below the surface.

@@mrtechie6810 depending on how deep the cables go.

Off to AliExpress I go (using your link). Thanks for another great video…already love how much time this is gonna save me

It wouldn't be very accurate unless the velocity factor of the cable was the same as cat5 or cat6. Signals travel at different speeds through wire depending on the insulation. The testers measure wire length by sending a pulse down the wire and measuring how long it takes for the reflection to come back.

Highly unlikely, I'm afraid. According to their web site it's due back in stock in Q4 2022! No firmware/app updates for years and no communication from Zoltan. I check the web site and forum daily in the hope of an update. It appears to be completely dead. It had so much potential. I rarely use mine now, I have other tools that do a better job but not necessarily in a single device.

That device always read as the sweet point between the £10 cable testers and the pro installer £1000s gear. Amazing that it was essentially a solo effort.

I just use a relatively cheap "Amazon Special" brand one although I generally avoid crimping connectors wherever possible and stick to premade patch leads. I used to use passthrough connectors but I've gone off them slightly as I don't like the way the bare ends of the wires are exposed outside the connector on the end. Nowadays I use the 2 part connectors with the separate "load bar" - almost as easy as a passthrough as you can pass the excess through the load bar then cut it off flush before inserting it into the connector, but once crimped, the bare ends of the wires are contained inside the connector.

That would be a dream although I haven't found any affordable option that perform any sort of actual cable certification/verification - just the high end Fluke/Trend testers. For DIY/smaller installs, the only really affordable option to fully test the cables meet spec would be to hire a proper tester for a couple of days. In the absence of one of those testers I generally just make sure to only ever buy cables from major well known brands and none of the "Amazon Special" brands that exist.

@@camerongray1515 I have seen excel cables fail out of the bag ! Could have been a bad batch. That was some 6 stuff , never seen any of there 6a fail , and i should hope not at that price !

It measures the cable length using a "TDR" test - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer. I don't really understand the science side of things but that page seems to explain it reasonably well.

I just bought one 5 mins ago on AliExpress for £43 including shipping, just went back to the exact page I bought it from and it's now £49 with shipping lol

Yeah, thankfully it's spelled correctly on the device itself!

What do you use then?

active POE only sends voltage after request by the device, just like USB PD or QC. Only passive POE is dangerous , it send voltage (usually 24V injected) all the time including to the wrong devices.

Unfortunately at that point you're looking at professional verification/certification type testers that cost thousands. I've generally ended up just using a laptop on each end of the cable and transferred a bunch of traffic using something like iPerf then looked for transmission errors. If you're doing occasional large installs, it may end up being a case of using a basic tester while doing the install and then hire a high end tester for a few days to do some final checks.

If you're looking to certify up to 1Gbps then you can pick up some older devices at sensible prices. JDSU Validators come up frequently at decent prices. Fluke CableIQs come up frequently but are usually a lot more. For 10Gbps then they will be much more expensive and as Cameron mentions, it would probably make more sense to hire one in! Over the years I've picked up quite a few different devices from cheap to expensive, Noyafa to Fluke, and I keep meaning to get their features into a table for comparison... One day it'll happen!

I noticed that too but forgot to mention it - my higher end "CCTV Tester" does show the difference - suspect this device is somehow adjusting the numbers slightly to all show the same if they are close together (maybe to reduce people contacting them confused about why the pairs are different lengths) but it does at least show the difference if it is significant (e.g. a break in the cable) - not ideal I suppose but still usable for finding breaks or the rough location of a fault.

@@camerongray1515 Thats for sure, for the price its a good buy and tells much more than the blinking lights version. 💯👍

Cable brands generally vary heavily between countries so I can't really recommend any worldwide brands, in the UK I tend to use cable from Connectix, Excel or Ultima amongst a few others. Generally what's important is looking for a known brand name that links to an actual cable company and not those "Amazon Brands" with random, made up names that have no real online presence. I'd also recommend buying cables directly from specialist network hardware or electrical wholesalers rather than places like Amazon or eBay. Also ensure that the cable you buy is pure copper and not "CCA" which stands for "Copper Clad Aluminium" and is a sure fire way to identify a fake/low quality cable. As for the type of cable, generally I use CAT6 as standard nowadays since the price increase over CAT5E is minimal and it'll handle the vast majority of installations - it'll even go as far as handling 10 gigabit ethernet on runs of up to around 35M and HDBaseT 2.0 video distribution. If you're looking to run 10 gigabit over longer distances or want to use things like HDBaseT 3.0 then the next step up would be CAT6A. Don't go near anything related to CAT7 - it's an oddball standard that actually predates CAT6A and specifies special connectors rather than regular RJ45 ones. Any CAT7 cables you find with RJ45 connectors are not standards compliant and only exist to satisfy the "Bigger CAT number means faster internet" crowd. Likewise, while CAT8 can be terminated using RJ45 connectors, it's designed for relatively short distances in places like datacentres and isn't really suitable/necessary for any normal domestic/office environment. If you're needing the 40Gbit speeds that CAT8 offers, you'd almost certainly be running fibre instead. Finally, if you're buying cable - while reels are available in shorted lengths so can be cheaper, you may want to look into buying it in a box as the box allows the cable to very easily be pulled out from a distance while running through a building rather than needing to manage a reel of cable.

If it is not a phone most of the time you need a cable usb a to usb c cable

@@GSAproductions True but that's only because they cheap out and don't put any negotiation chip or even programming resistors in the device to be charged.

It entirely comes down to what you're doing, if all you're doing is running a couple of cables very occasionally then the cheap tester is fine, but there have been many scenarios I've found myself in where this tester would have saved me well more than £50 worth of my time by speeding up the tracking down of an issue. In practice it's extremely useful to be able to work out which end of a cable is badly terminated or to determine if the break is somewhere in the middle of the cable. Then, if the cable is broken somewhere in the middle and it isn't practical to replace the entire cable (for example, if it's plastered into walls) then this tester can help track down an approximate distance to the break to allow a repair to be made in the middle of the cable.

@@camerongray1515 If you are required to replace the entire cable .. then the more expensive tester is not going to save you anything .. this is the case in most cases ..

I'm not referring to patch cables if that's what you're thinking of, I'm referring to running structured cabling within a building. I think in my time, I've only come across one or two cables that were actually broken in the middle and needed replaced, every other time the basic tester has shown a break, it has been due to a bad termination on one end where a tester such as this comes in extremely useful as it can tell you which end has the issue rather than forcing you to remove faceplates, take apart patch panels or re-crimp jacks unnecessarily.

Not sure what you mean? The point of this video was to take a look at a tester that was the lowest cost possible option that also supported TDR cable length testing, a feature that is very worth having for any sort of reasonable network install.

@@camerongray1515 Okay. I might misunderstand you.

i watched it at 0.75x speed. :))

@@orange11squares Good idea

Correct, this is just a continuity and TDR tester so it doesn't actually validate the cable in terms of its bandwidth. To properly test that a cable meets spec you'd need a much higher end certification tester where you're looking at costs around £10k plus! Without one of those, your cheapest bet would likely be to just run some high speed transfers over each link and look for transmission errors. If you really need to properly certify a link, you may get away with using a cheap tester like this to verify the initial connection when you install them and then at the end of the job hire a high end tester for a couple of days to perform the final checks.