MS2-KIT MicroScanner2 Professional Kit, RJ45 Tester and VDV Cable Tester

This tool kit is great for any network technician that works primarily on copper lines. (This unit does not work on fiber) Also not that this tool is a Cable Verifier - it does not Certify Cable - for that you will need the CableIQ devices. I'll break it down so you can decide if you need the whole kit or just the Microscanner 2 Microscanner 2: The main unit in this kit it the Microscanner 2. It is built into a fairly rugged housing - enough to protect it from occasional drops from reasonable heights - I wouldn't drop it off of a 2-story house or anything, but it should survive being dropped from a 6-foot ladder or the top of a large server rack. The remote terminator is built into the blue snap-on cap that covers up the RJ-11/45 and coaxial jacks on the top of the unit. It is simple enough to use - simply plug one end of your cable into the MS2 and the other end into the remote terminator and watch the magic happen. The MS2 displays cable length, PoE, and a wire map to diagnose/verify the type of cable you're connected to. What you can verify/Diagnose: Straight-Through Cables Crossover Cables Split Pairs Crossed Pairs Faults Shorts PoE Switchport Speed Cable Length Distance to fault. The MS2 is also a toner - so you can use it in conjunction with any analog or digital toner probe to locate cables. This tool alone should be in every installer's tool bag. - The price is a bit high, but it will pay for itself in time saved if you're installing cable on a regular basis. This tool is not recommended for a home user or a one-off installation. This is a tool for Professional Network installers and technicians. Remote Identifiers #2-#7 When you're doing a big job, the remote identifiers make verification and location identification simple. Plug your remote IDs into the jacks you've just terminated - (I like doing this at the wall jacks immediately after I've terminated) - then go to the wiring closet/IDF/MDF and plug the Microscanner2 into the punch panel jacks you've terminated to verify the cable and it's location in the building. This makes labeling jacks and punch panels quick and painless - much better than walking back and forth to each jack from the wiring closet with an individual remote terminator. Wondering why the Remote IDs are #2-#7 - the remote terminator cap on the MS2 is #1. These work for both coaxial cable and RJ-45/11 jacks. Intellitone 200 Probe Digital and Analog toning - Isolate terminated cables OR individual wire pairs when using digital toning. Wiremapping If you've already got a toner probe,use it - if you don't - get the kit - the probe is great. Lots of fluff - Cables, a nice little case to hold your remote terminators, and a fully padded case for the whole kit - a nice touch. Overall - if you need a tool for wire mapping and cable verification, the Microscanner 2 is a great tool. It's pricey at $425, but worth it on your first big cabling job, just on time saved. (Bid on the job - don't charge an hourly rate) If you also need the remote IDs and a Toner Probe, get the kit - it'll save you a few hundred dollars compared to buying the tools individually - the Remote IDs alone are $235.

I have ALWAYS been a fan of Fluke products. Although they are expensive for most tools now-a-days they are the industry standard in quality for networking and electrical tools I needed this for a new house wiring

So I'll break this review down into two parts. The MicroScanner itself, and the toner. I got to field test (play with) this for a few days. So the MicroScanner itself is pretty good. It's able to indicate things like opens, shorts, crossed wires and split pairs. I do have some gripes about the wiremap though. If there is a short, you will not get a wiremap, even if you have an ID on the end of the wire. I believe it will still give you the device on the end if you test individual wire pairs, but wiremap is completely unavailable in that mode. While the product does say that it handles PoE, it seems to only handle 802.3af compliant PoE, and ANY OTHER KINDS OF VOLTAGE are still dangerous to the device. Just because the device can REPORT voltage doesn't mean it can HANDLE it. My personal recommendation is to not leave the device plugged into any powered line for more than just a few seconds, 802.3af or not. For everything else about the MicroScanner, it works great. The display is even lit for when you're working in the dark, or if pea soup LCD screens are just hard to see, which is usually the case. (The screen is not actually pea soup colored. It is white with a crisp white backlight. I'm just thinking back to old gameboy days) Now this is where I was really disappointed. The toner features are basically just unusable. I'm going to skip things that are undesirable but bearable, like battery drain or poor volume features, and overall cheap feel of the probe. I'm pretty sure the following problems are due to me having received a bad unit, and I am in the process of seeking customer support. Still really annoyed though. So the toner / probe combo is just really weak. I'm supposed to be able to use the probe to tone out a single wire from within an entire bundle, and I can't do that at all. Even 5 feet out of the toner, the probe is already very weak, with the digital toner only working when a few inches away. The analog toner is very hard to hear. The "locate" vs "isolate" settings on the probe are basically the same sensitivity, and are both really bad. Perhaps the "locate" mode is a tad bit stronger, but really not much to make a difference in actual usage. Finally the digital mode is supposed to tell me proximity with a scale from 1 - 8 (using the LEDs), but it doesn't. In "locate" mode it is about 6 - 8, and in "isolate" mode it is about 4 - 7. Any farther away and it just cuts out, rather than slowly leveling off to 1 like it is advertised to do. EDIT: A bit more field testing gives mixed results. Sometimes it appears to behave the way it should, and other times it doesn't. I haven't yet figured out why. If i switch to analog mode on the probe (with digital mode on the toner), I can ever so slightly hear the digital beeping from the toner, but it's just not strong, and apparently not strong enough to be picked up digitally. Amazing that my ears are more precise than the probe. In analog toning mode, it's not ANY louder, and unless you have jackrabbit ears that are pressed up to the speaker, you're not going to hear anything unless the probe is, again, very VERY close to the wire. When I went to tone out a jack in the wall from a cabinet at 100ft as a test, I could not use the "locate" function to find the cable. I ran it in circles around all the bundles, and nothing. It was after running the probe accross ALL the punchdowns that I finally got it to detect the tone. So in summary, the toner is almost not useful. I tried some troubleshooting, of course. The batteries in both the Microscanner and the probe were fine, so not a power issue. (2xAA at ~1.5V in MS2 and 9V-bat at ~8.5V in probe) The probe senses the Microscanner itself from a MUCH FARTHER distance than the wire, leading me to believe that the Microscanner is not doing a very good job of injecting the tone onto the wire. Analog probe mode confirms this with much louder sound. Electrical engineers feel free to scream at me, since that's probably just how these kinds of things work. After fiddling around with copper (straight run vs. twisted run), it's no surprise that twisted gives much poorer results. A lecture about electric waves could be inserted here, but i'll skip that. However even with untwisted copper, the results were mediocre, and I was still not getting the detection range I would expect. (Still not enough to detect a wire in a bundle or through a wall like advertised) So my hopes that it would be useful with phone cabling was shot down pretty fast too. The probe's tip is also very inconsistent, with different orientations relative to a wire giving wildly different results, and while i'm sure this is due to the nuances of the physics of electromagnetism, it really shouldn't be that bad. When I say bad I mean that if I place the probe right up against the wire, it might not detect at all, but shifting it slightly in position or angle makes it blare at full power. There's also undesirables, which i said i'd skip but i changed my mind. I'll just gloss over them. They include, but are not limited to: bad speaker placement, bad volume control placement, battery drain, digital mode not using volume as much as it should, or in the right way, and cheapish look and feel in the dials and the speaker, compared to other fluke networks products. On the bright side, the wiremap feature of the toner works great, if you know... I could find the wire in the first place... *insert salt* TL;DR I probably got a bad unit. MicroScanner2 works great with just one minor disappointment (It's documented). Toning features are almost useless. I'd like to think I expected too much but the unit isn't able to even come close to performing what was advertised. I would have given a higher rating, but I REALLY wanted to be able to tone out wires not just quickly, but AT ALL. What's odd to me is that other people seem to have a lot of success with the toning features, leading me to believe that my situation is not the norm. I'm sure with electromagnetic devices such as toner probes QC can be more difficult, or that I'm just really unlucky. I'll try returning this unit, and i'll update this review if the problems go away. Hopefully they will.

This is a nice kit for professional daily use. if your a amateur and only using the tools occasionally you would probably be better suited with other kits for the $$$. this kit is durable and expensive does what it says cuts troubleshooting time down for me and always works. what can i say its a Fluke! good products. review the kits careful when selecting the kit their are several.

Purchased this product a decade ago, it just failed. I'm not upset, the MicroScanner2 did its job, but I called Fluke repair and was told the unit doesn't get repaired, only replaced for $511.00. WHAT??!!! Why would I pay that when I can purchase the Klein Tools Scout Pro 3 ($86.00) for 1/6th of Microscanner2's replacement price? And if it fails, just easily replace it for another $86.00. Klein Tools is also a highly reputable company, and the Scout Pro 3 literally does everything the MicroScanner2 does. I do own other Fluke test instruments, but for this category the MicroScanner2 gets a HARD PASS.

The best Network testing tool

Works well. Toner is bit sensitive in a tight patch panels but other wise no complains. Wish it was bit cheaper

Muy buen equipo te ayuda mucho con las fallas que podría presentar la red

Outils de qualité et de diagnostique, très utile pour qualifier les prises réseau cat 4-5-6 et teste de câble Coaxial

Works well and the case is great for transport and storage.