Fluke LinkIQ Field Test and Review

so we got our fluke meter here you know doing the test ali is this the dumbest wiring thing you've ever seen yes take a look this i mean we actually got it to pass don't we we're gonna fix it right but i've seen some stuff but this is uh we wanted to test the fluke once we got here this and this we're 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 this bad at this particular location tom here from lauren 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 uh bounced it off a couple things 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 luke 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 on their 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 electronic 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 that a school had had 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 100 feet away because we didn't wire it and i don't have any reasons why that was done 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 to run around the building chasing wires so having this being able to label and do this was great because we were 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 cameras pad but being able before you just plug another camera in and hope it comes on and troubleshoot you can plug this in know where it goes label where it goes and put another label on that wire and also have a poe load test 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 brake is is the brake 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 100 feet of cable but at the 50 foot mark two pair are broken this is where this becomes really handy when you're doing the troubleshooting like that now the other thing you can do is measure past the 300 foot 1 meter standard for most of your category 6 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 100 meter normal limit but uh 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 usbc charging man i like that this is usbc that's huge to me you get a little coupler and 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 the cable either the cable or the port again 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 test you know and i have it by left at the default and we just hit auto test and we actually can watch the cable go all the way up it's going to test all the wires and then go through a test yay look this cable's cat 6 and can run up to 10 gig because of its short length no not cat 6a this is cat 6 but due to its 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 going to actually go ahead and do on a test result save or x without saving cancel and we can just hit save as it's going to increment it says youtube here test08 and then tom we have the operator in there results saved now if you flip this on to the side as i said there's a plug here for usbc and a network jack on the end that's really not much else there is a easy to get out battery that you can pop this out it's a proprietary battery that you can get from flute 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 it's 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 going to actually plug 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 haven't plugged in cisco we're just going to 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 going to 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 going to tell you everything that it can negotiate then it's going to go test the wiring on here and it's going to 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 days by the way cisco 8 poe vlan 1 the advertised speeds on the 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 still waiting there we go we know this will do uh 13 watt 50 volts under load under load is important it's that's one of the reasons it clicks it's actually putting us under load then we can hit save this information you notice just the name is generic cisco apoe but we do have gigabit ethernet 2 0 we have the cisco ports save as and we've got this test id9 you can edit each one of these to put a little bit more information in but let's hit ok now we're going to plug it into one of my unifi poe switches i'm gonna do the same thing we're gonna hit the auto test on the unifi 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 going to 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 3 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 unifi 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 to 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 uh 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 skill than staff member that you're you know 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 restart 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 want to 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 so [Laughter] 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 if you'd like to hire a sure project head over to lawrences.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 25,463

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, Fluke LinkIQ, fluke linkiq tester, fluke linkiq vs, fluke linkiq review, fluke linkiq kit, fluke networks, copper cable certification, cable tester, network cable testing, cable performance tester, network cable qualifier, cable testing, cable performance, network test equipment, poe tester, cable qualification tester

Id: A9bkCBcy9Uk

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021