Three New Innovative Products and Maybe a Future One?

The Silver level award was taken home by our new FI-3000 FiberInspector™ Pro MPO camera.  The FI-3000 lets you get a grip on more efficient MPO inspection.  Visitors at the booth got to see how the camera’s Live View provides an instant, real-time image and use simple touchscreen gestures to view the full connector down to individual endfaces.  You can store results on your phone and share them through text or email or use the industry-leading LinkWare to store complete project reports including copper, fiber loss, OTDR and endface images. Compact, ergonomic design with autofocus makes it comfortable and fast even when you’re testing hundreds of cables or ports.  It even comes with a cool holster that you can wear around the show floor and get lots of looks and questions.

Next in the trifecta of awards, earning Gold, is the OptiFiber® Pro High Dynamic Range OTDR.  This product consists of new modules and software turn the existing OptiFiber Pro into a powerful tool for documenting and troubleshooting Outside Plant and Passive Optical Networks.  Addressing 1490 nm, 1625 nm and combined 1310/1550 nm with a dynamic range of up to 42 dB, the new modules allow users to find more faults over longer distances.  OptiFiber Pro’s award-winning interface is enhanced with new features to support these applications, including automated identification of splitters and Expert-Manual mode which allows users to optimize the instrument’s performance by easily modifying automated settings chosen by the OTDR. This is in addition to groundbreaking features including automated setup, pinch-and-zoom analysis of traces and Event Map™ interpretation of results.

It may seem surprising that the least expensive product of the bunch – the new MicroScanner™ PoE – takes the top-level Platinum award.  But one of the big draws of the product is a price that’s far less than any other 802.11bt PoE compatible tester – placing it within reach of nearly any technician.  As the usage of PoE devices expands, so does the confusion.  That’s because the term “PoE” is not defined by any standard and a wide variety of standardized and somewhat-standardized implementations are available. Even more confusing, multiple standards, multiple power levels, a variety of names such as “PoE+”, “PoE++”, and other designators are used. The result is that it’s difficult even for experts to know what devices will work together.  The MicroScanner PoE solves this problem by displaying the maximum power class indicated by the switch as defined the new Ethernet Alliance certification program, making it easy for the tech to know the amount of power available. The MicroScanner PoE also provides cable and switch port testing to assist the technician installing PoE and non-PoE devices.

Finally, visitors got an up-close vision of the future when we teamed up with RealWear of Vancouver, WA to demonstrate a “hands free” solution for fiber endface inspection.  Not yet a product, this is a peek into a possible future for portable test devices.  We used the RealWear HMT-1 wearable Android tablet, a head-mounted device with a high-resolution micro display and advanced voice recognition.  The demonstration allowed customers to control the FI-3000 through the HMT-1’s advanced voice recognition command system using our FI-IN application.  Users could focus the camera manually or automatically and initiate an optional Autotest, scanning the fibers on the endface and then presenting a PASS/FAIL result indicating whether the endface is clean as per IEC61300-3-35 standards.  The user could then view the endface in the head-mounted display and use the voice commands to zoom in and then pan across the entire endface by simply moving his or her head.

Want to see more of the future?  Just head over to our newly redesigned http://www.flukenetworks.com website and check out the new look designed to make it easier to find what you’re looking for – especially on mobile devices.