All cable suppliers say that if you want a long-term warranty on your installation, #certification is required. There are other benefits for you as the installer, too: protection in case of disputes, quality control, even your reputation among your customers and the competition. Let’s look at the value of certification for your projects in different situations.
Return loss is the ratio of signal power injected from a source compared to the amount that is returned or reflected back toward the source. It is a critical performance parameter in both copper twisted pair and fiber optic cabling systems, because it can interfere with the transmitted signal and can contribute to an increase in the measured insertion loss (the amount of power that a that a signal loses as it travels along a cable link).
A free testing guide for industrial systems integrators is available from Fluke Networks and Rockwell Automation. The guide provides a comprehensive approach to reduce startup and operational problems related to copper and fiber-optic cabling and allows integrators to deliver more-reliable customer solutions.Testing cabling during the start up process helps avoid many industrial Ethernet failures.
Whether you’re a process or plant engineer, a technician, or an electrician, if you work in an Industrial Ethernet environment, you’ve got to be an expert in a wide array of areas. When the line is down, the priority is a quick fix to get it back up and running. Sometimes these “temporary” quick fixes are put into place and forgotten until the next time the line goes down, and then you are left to fix the “fix.” Learn the twelve common Industrial Ethernet mistakes, so you can avoid them going forward.
Delay happens for all signals across all cable types, and propagation delay is the amount of time it takes for a transmitted signal to be received at the other end of the link or channel. The propagation delay in a twisted-pair copper cabling such as Category 6 or 6A is related to the nominal velocity of propagation (NVP), as well as the length of the cable and the operating frequency. You might remember from our previous blog on reading the top of a LinkWare™ report that NVP is used by your tester to calculate the length of the cable.
Fluke Networks demonstrated a prototype single pair Ethernet (SPE) adapter for its DSX-8000 at the Rockwell Automation Show. SPE is making waves in the industrial-automation world as a potential replacement for fieldbus architectures. The adapter is being made in very limited quantities and is currently only available to industrial automation and cabling manufacturers for their use in labs but has been released with the expectation that SPE will become widely adopted.
Fluke Networks has announced testing capabilities to support Anixter’s Utility Grade (UTG) Infrastructure, a new technology platform, assurance program and design approach that redefines the infrastructure layer to support building subsystems, technologies and applications. The new test limits allow users of the DSX CableAnalyzer Series to certify the performance of installed cabling infrastructure to qualify for Anixter’s ten- and twenty-year UTG warranties.
A photo wrap up of the 2019 Fall BICSI Conference.
More than half of Industrial Ethernet problems can be traced to cabling. Testing cables when installed can speed the startup process and prevent problems in the future. This webinar co-hosted by Fluke and Panduit reviews twisted pair cabling standards, cabling issues and testers for pre-deployment and troubleshooting.
In the ninth episode our Cabling Professor series, Christian Schillab discusses the testing of Modular Plug Terminated Links (MPTL).
