I am not an IT person by a long shot. However, I am sort of a home-networking “prosumer.” Over the years I’ve been steadily building up and expanding my home network, and it now has some of the best home and small business networking tools and equipment available on the market. However, Internet networks being what they are, are prone to all sorts of failures and disconnects. In the past I would either try to reset and power-cycle everything on the network, call up Comcast, or just wait hoping that the network problems would just sort themselves out on their own. However, with this Fluke network tester I can now diagnose problems on my own and try to implement simple solutions when available. This has already helped me with a couple of networking outage situations that in the past would require some major hair-pulling.

This tester unit is very small – much smaller than I had imagine. It is fairly easy to setup and use, even for the networking amateurs. It comes with an iOS app that I was only too happy to use. It looks very well built, and it’s likely to be useful for at least another generation of networking equipment – if not longer. It is a very pricey little gadget though, and unless you have a lot of money to spare or you depend on this kind of equipment for your livelihood this little guy might just be out of your purchasing range.