Fluke is an international company that makes test equipment,
both common and esoteric. Most of their equipment is in the form of
a hand held meter in a characteristic yellow-orange rubber and plastic
case that is nearly indestructable.
They make a line of very rugged high quality digital multimeters that are the
electrical engineer's dream. The meters are small, and will measure
just about every observable electical quantity. A standard multimeter
typically covers volts, amps, and ohms. A typical fluke would
also add to this capacitance, inductance, temperature (with optional
thermocouple), duty cycle, pulse width,
bandwidth, and frequency. On top of this, the meter can act as a
data logger and will keep basic statistics (such as min, max, average)
of the signal it is measuring.
But Wait! There's more! They make other meters that specialize
in measuring everything from resistance of insulators,
power quality analyzers, oscilloscopes, various calibration tools,
signal generators
(waveform generators up to TV signal), pressure sensors,
and others.
They also make some very sophisticated computer
network diagnostic
tools and software, including hand held packet sniffers,
network connectivity discovery tools, protocol analyzers,
cable testers
(coax, cat5, fiber, others),
NIC testers, etc.
As with their mutimeter, their cable tester goes overboard on
features.
Not only can it test for the standard things such as cable connectivity,
crossed wires, and mismatched pairs, but also cable length,
cable speed,
impulse noise, impedance,
return loss, propagation delay, attenuation,
and can detect the location of cable faults, and will automatically
detect (unexpected) activity on a live cable (such as network packets
or a phone ring signal).
Ok, if these things are so great, why doesn't everyone have one?
'cuz they're DAMN expensive! A few other companies
make meters as high quality, and many make testers that have the
standard functionality.
Spuunbenda says: ee's may recognize the unofficial motto: "If it works, it's a Fluke."