Cable Qualification from 5e to 6

[Roveer]

I've been installing cat5e cable for years, mostly in my own home and on a few small jobs I picked up along the way.

Since 1993 I've had a Microtest MT350 cable tester which also grades the cable and will give a pass/fail for cat5. Mostly it made sure I had full connections on all 8 pins (sometimes you just get a bad crimp), and it also did NEXT (near/end cross talk testing) for noise.

Fast forward and I'm getting ready to do some cat6 cable installations and feel that I just want to qualify the cable to make sure the installation was done right. I'd also like to know that it's capable of running at full gb speeds.

I've done some poking around and found testers from 1,500.00 to 15,000.00

Specifically I'm seeing the fluke CableIQ tester going for 900-1000 on eBay. This is also supposed to "qualify the cable for 1000base T

Does anyone have any good suggestions as to whether I should upgrade my old MT350 (which still works fine). Microtest made a newer version called the pentascanner but I can't seem to find much additional information on specs. These are going for around 250-400 dollars on eBay.

I don't want to spend a fortune as I really don't do that much wiring, but when I do, I want to know that I'm doing it right.

Many thanks.

Roveer

 

[System Error Message]

if you have cat5e and they arent giving you gigabit speeds, then they're only cat5. Funny thing is that you can get gigabit on cat5 as it uses the same frequency as usual 100Mb/s ethernet, but all pairs. For me i found out that it was the head that was causing me to get 100Mb/s while the cable was good.

Unless you are a contractor, the price of these testers arent viable if you are doing it yourself, i'd suggest you get some samples tested, then do the installation and hire someone to test your installation.

 

[coxhaus]

Hopefully if it is a CAT5 tester it will test all the wires. But with 100Mb/s connection not all wires were used.

The Fluke tester sounds like it will test all wire pairs since it has 1000BASE-T.

 

[Roveer]

So I'm in the process of assembling a Microtest OmniScanner 2. This will give me true CAT6 qualification. The only thing I don't like about it is it huge. No really, it's almost twice the size of my MT350 and has these klunky adaptors that go on top. I was going to go with a Fluke CableIQ and eventually probably will, but for now I'm going to do the Microtest thing.