NF-859GT Network Cable Tester with Optical Power Meter for RJ45 RJ11 CAT5 CAT6 POE/Phone Lines CAT3 LAN Tone Probe Kit NCV & Ethernet Wire Tracer Fiber Tester Network Tools

After you get used to it, you can really troubleshoot with the scanner, use the built-in TDR, verify continuity, ping devices, etc. All in all a very very useful tool.

This is extremely useful, but also very, very confusing. It's a great price (my coworkers guessed it would be five times the cost, and didn't even believe me when I told them the price until they looked for themselves), but the build feels very cheap. The manual and on-screen instructions are poorly translated, and sometimes say the opposite of what they mean. There are seven (seven!) RJ45 ports between the two pieces, and each function can only be performed with one of them on each side, which leads to a lot of plugging and unplugging as you go through the tests, though it generally does a good job of pointing you to the correct ones to use with arrows on the screen and labels printed on the ports. This is what I've found for each function, and the problems I've run into: Cont - There are two ways to check the continuity/pinouts of a cable with this product: using the tester and the remote wand together, one on each end of the wire; or if you have access to both ends of the wire in one spot the wand can run the test all by itself. Unfortunately, each method uses different ports. The wand-only method uses the ports labelled "CONT-M" and "CONT-R" on the sides of the wand, while the long-distance method uses the "CONT-A" port that is hidden under an unmarked cover on the base of the wand. While the port itself is labelled, the label is also under the cover. If you use the long-distance method with either of the other two "CONT-*" ports it reports all pins shorted together. Scan - This tones wires in two ways: digital or analog. The digital scan works well, but the range seems to be very low: you have to physically touch the wand to the wire to get a hit. The probe on the wand is too thick to fit inside an RJ45 jack, and it won't sound if you press it as far in as you can get it; you have to access the back of the patch panel or plug a cable into the jack and then touch the cable. The analog scan is terrible: very short range, faint, and covered by a lot of static. I tried using my old wand with this toner, and the signal was strong and clear - this new wand was so bad I thought it was defective and sent it in for replacement. The replacement behaved the exact same. Port Flash - Works well. Length - The manual doesn't say, but it has a minimum length limit that's something like 4 meters. It fails with the message "Cable Open or beyond range," and the manual doesn't say which port on the wand to use to complete the circuit. It turns out none of them work, because while the error message complains "Cable Open," it actually is required to be open. If it's plugged into anything on the other end (wand, switch, device) the test fails. Because I believed the error message was accurate, I thought this was defective also, until the replacement exhibited the same behavior. POE - Works well. Ping - Works well, though entering IP information manually is frustrating and unintuitive. First, because the button highlighting looks backwards to me, so I always click the wrong thing first (dull gray is selected; bright blue is not - except while setting the IP address numbers, when it's the reverse); second, because the up/down buttons move the cursor along the address while the OK button changes the selected number and the Back button confirms. It's just weird, and the place where you set how many ping attempts you want to send is labelled "Conut." IP Scan - Works well, but has the same UI problems as Ping. Switch - This one is disappointing. It claims to be "Link Speed Testing," but it doesn't actually test the link speed, it only reports the speed the switch is set to. Despite everything I still really like this product. You can't beat the price, and it does almost everything it says it does, but it was very frustrating figuring all of this out. I hope this review can shortcut the pain of the learning curve for the next person.

Just make sure you read the instructions well. It works pretty well, and not tough when you follow the directions.

Todo Ok

If you are not familiar with Amazon Vine, it is basically Amazon trading free* products for honest reviews. You see a lot of Vine reviews that are cookie cutter and based on templates. I aim to make my reviews honest and non-cookie cutter (other than this intro and disclaimer). * These items are not actually free as Vine members pay income tax on the items they receive. Therefore, I will never order something from Vine unless I actually intend to use it. I think this is important for readers to understand because it means I will never order an item just to provide a fake five star review to a company. If I review something as good, it means I actually enjoyed using it or it fills its intended purpose correctly. Items that don't meet my expectations will be reviewed accordingly. Why I ordered this item: I do cable installs frequently for work, and the old Tripp-Lite tool I have is getting pretty rickety. That tool was over $600 when I bought it. I wanted to see if a cheaper model could hang. Likes: * Wowsers, this is the biggest upgrade I can imagine. * The old unit generated reports and this one does not, but other than that this new one is superior in every way. * It has new features that I have wanted (PoE testing) and the visual output is almost infinitely better than the basic display on my old unit. * I mostly use cat6 tests and toning, and this device does those very well. I toned three cables in our walls out and they worked like a champ. I also tested a cat5e cable that was working but only at 100Mbps and found out that it had a short. * I will definitely use the PoE testing component as we hit PoE cameras all the time that have power issues, but I didn't have any PoE devices at home for me to test. * USB-C charging on both parts! The old one used 9v batteries. No likes: * The reports would be nice I guess, but I feel that the visual output on this more than makes up for a lack of exportable reports. I did not deduct a star for this because other than the first time job I used my old tester on, no client has ever wanted reports. Would I pay full price for this product: Yes, 100%. Final thoughts: If I had known I could get one of these for $130 I would have ditched my old unit years ago. This thing is crazy and will be an extremely valuable addition to my toolkit.

Bought this to do simple continuity checks on Ethernet cables. Never worked the first time I tried to used it in the field. Called Amazon to see about an exchange and was put on hold until I gave up. Poor customer service from Amazon and bad Quality from this product. Please don’t waist your time on this product. Zero stars.

Toner works great, light meter needs to be set so it doesn't change settings.

My first use after getting this was to scan a network and see if it can list all the IP's. This was a disaster first try because the unit froze up, butons doing nothing, long pressing and combinations did not help, there was just no way to force restart, I did not read the manual so forgive me if I'm wrong. I had to open it up and disconnect the battery, after that it worked fine, I tried scanning the network about ten times after that and it work well, did not know what was up the first time? You also have to pay attention to set your IP up first, scan the network and assign one automatically, it seems to works fine, some other reviewer here has no success with this option so I don't know what's up with his unit. That being said all other functions work as they should and I did not encounter any other problems after that. The functions to select and change is counterintuitive and someone who has no experience with these things will take a while to learn. The thing is crazy light and feels like it has no guts, thought they forgot to put in the battery and circuit board! For the price you pay for all its functions that seem to work ok there's not much complaining from me. I went ahead and modified mine with a switch on the side to cut off power if ever it freezes on me again...