On 15 Jan 2004 21:03:12 GMT, wrote:



So I managed to prise the Pentascanner from the enveloping clutches of
our resident LAN wiring guru, after promising to take better care of it
than my own most delicate bodyparts, etc. etc. I'm happy (to the point of
smugness) to report that all 28 of the Cat5/5e runs rate a decent PASS
according to the Pentascanner. Because it's only a house, all the runs
are quite short in datacom-cabling terms - all are around the 15m mark.
So, although the powersum NEXT measurements are not massively inspiring,
just "decent enough" (an average of 37 dB, worst one 33.4dB), and the
return loss averages at 16dB with a couple as poor as 12dB, the shortness
of the runs means that there's so little attenuation that the ACR (moral
equivalent of signal-to-noise ratio) is massively overspec. Dunno if
we'll ever run Gigabit (1000BaseT) over these links, but they're certainly
good for 100BaseT.

Personally I think it was a fluke.......


Results saved away in spreadsheet (the Pentascanner is kind enough to
dump the test results in comma-separated value format; sadly, unless
you load up the proprietary Windows-only software, the columns are not
handily identified - had to decode what-was-what from the nicely-formatted
output of the same data!) for a time when I'm bored enough to want to
analyse them...

Happy days - Stefek

..andy

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