Does anyone know of affordable cable testing equipment? I.e. not the ones with 8 leds that just test whether there's a connection, but one that actually measures the performance? Fluke is way expensive, I imagine there must be cheaper products that don't provide all the features and build quality of Fluke but that will still give poor old me who only wires his own house and home office some assurance that I didn't screw up completely?
A Gigabit Ethernet PHY has to do quite some signal processing (line equalization) for its normal function. And there are a few chipsets that allow you to inspect the link parameters in quite some detail. For example, have a look here for screenshots of the broadcom advanced control suite.
The link has to run in 1000BaseT-Mode to make the tools show any meaningful output, so have a known-good switch connected to the "other" side. I had used them in a distant past (must have been 10 years ago or so) to find the "best" links in an otherwise messed up building installation that could be reliabily be used for higher transmission speeds.
It's of course much less information that what you'd get from a proper ethernet cable analyzer, but much, much more than what a simple "yes, I can ping the other side" can give you.
Probably the most affordable way to get some confidence is to connect two computers at either end of the cable and do a transfer speed test using iperf or something like that. If you are using random unmatched computers, do a "control" test with a short, high-quality patch cord between them to get a baseline performance measurement.
