Bye Bye Buzz!

June 6, 2018 / General, 101 learning, Installation and testing, Upgrading and troubleshooting, Best Practices

While labeling per the ANSI/TIA-606-B Administration Standards is considered best practice, let’s face it—labels don’t always happen or sometimes they’re simply not visible where you need them. Over time, cabling links may also have been reconfigured in the telecommunications room or the data center. And when you need to trace a cable or simply identify the other end among hundreds of copper links, a toner and probe can be your best friend.

Simple Yet Plagued by Noise

Ideal for tracing, verifying continuity and locating breaks, toners and probes have been around for over a century and the general concept is quite simple—the tone generator injects a high harmonic signal that travels down the length of a copper conductor (or any metal conductor for that matter) and the probe generates an audible noise when it comes into close proximity of that signal. While the concept is simple, there is one major challenge when it comes to using toners and probes—interference.

You see, probes don’t just pick up the sound of the toner. Probes are inductive listening devices that will pick up any signal interference and their harmonics generated from surrounding magnetic fields, including lighting, AC wiring, fans or a host of other sources that usually have a frequency of 60 Hz (or 50 Hz outside of North America). And when you’re trying to listen for that one specific tone that lets you identify that one specific cable or wire, interference can make that a rather difficult task. In noisy environments, all that “buzz” from external sources can completely overwhelm the tone being sent by a tone generator to the point of making it impossible to accurately trace or identify the cable.

But what if you could filter out all that buzz when listening for tone to make it quick and easy to trace cables? Well now you can.

The Buzz Stops Here

Through advanced filtering technology, Fluke Networks’ new Pro3000F Filtered Probe removes signal interference at 50 or 60 Hz and their harmonics to make it easy to find the cable or wire you need to identify even in the noisiest environments.

The latest iteration of the classic Pro3000™ Tone and Probe family, the Pro300F Filtered Probe has the same powerful speaker that technicians have come to love as it makes tracing cables through drywall, wood or other enclosures quick and easy.

The new probe works with the existing Pro3000 Tone Generator, which features SmartTone™ technology that provides five distinct tones for exact pair identification, features angled-bed-of-nails clips for easy access to individual wires and can send tone up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) on most cables. It also is compatible with any analog tone generator, including those built into Fluke Networks MicroScanner2™, CableIQ™, and DSX CableAnalyzer™ Series test equipment.

Even with 400 customers having already given our Pro3000 Tone and Probe 4.4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, we’re pretty sure that the Pro3000F will be a gamechanger. After all, noise filtering was the number one requested enhancement—and that was one signal we heard loud and clear!