Tag Archives: Fluke

Fluke TN2100 Terminator

Because I’m a sucker for accessories for tools, I bought a Fluke TN2100 “Enhanced Terminator Far End Device”.

This device was made to go with the Fluke CopperPro Series II (Aka Fluke 990DSL), and is required for doing certain qualifications on the line, such as profiling the behavior of the line at different frequencies, wideband noise levels, etc.

This is all to qualify the quality of a loop / pair (or pairs – Can do up to 2 pairs / 4 cables) as being capable of supporting a variety of services like A/V/DSL as well as E1s / ISDN services, EMF, etc, etc.

It’s a super useful feature, if your loop is rubbish, putting an E1 circuit on it will end up with a high bit-error-rate, and putting a DSL circuit on it will see it constantly loose sync, so being able to qualify if the loop is any good beforehand is a must.

Alas the unit I’ve got came from eBay, and didn’t come with the leads, there’s just an RJ45 port on the terminator, with no indication as to what’s what.

So here’s the answer (which isn’t in any manual I could find) which I found through trial-and-error and cracking the case open to work out what was what:

RJ45 PinFunctionColour (T-658A)
1Blue Pair 1 (A-Leg)White-Green
2Blue Pair 1 (B-Leg)Green
3Yellow Pair 1 (A-Leg for Exchange Passthrough)White-Orange
4Yellow Pair 1 (B-Leg for Exchange Passthrough)Blue
5Red Pair 2 (A-Leg)White-Blue
6Red Pair 2 (A-Leg)Orange
7UnusedBrown-White
8EarthBrown

Hopefully of some use to some one.

Charging problem on Fluke 990 CopperPro

I have a bit of a thing for Test Sets

Arguably, the most capable (toolbox-carryable) test set out there is the Fluke 990 CopperPro, combined TDR, Butt Set, Toner, RFL, Noise meter, etc, etc, it’s a really cool gizmo (And probably worthy of a blog post in itself someday).

Alas mine had stopped taking much of a charge, you’d plug it into the charger, and after 20 minutes of use, it’d report low power and shut down.

Sitting on the charger the Fluke would show the red charging light for about 20 minutes, then the charging light would turn off.

If I unplugged and replugged the charger I’d get red charging light for another few minutes, then turn off again.

Naively, I ruled it to be an issue with the battery (Which is close to 10 years old), and ordered a new one.

But with the new battery in hand, the same issue.

Stupidly, it turns out I was using a 15v charger, technically the unit supports a 15v charger, but it seems after a period, the internal voltage regulator overheats and shuts off, meaning the battery never got a good charge.

Swapping it with a 12v charger and I’m charging without issues.

But not before I ended up ordering a new battery, so now with the new battery I’m getting 15 hours of runtime out of a charge, and still squeezing 7 out of 8 year old battery it originally came with.

Dumb mistake but hopefully an easy fix for anyone with the same issue.