Launched in October this year, Fluke Networks' EtherScope is a handheld network troubleshooting device aimed at IT staff dealing primarily with network access-layer problems. Costing nearly £4,000 + VAT, the device appears expensive but should repay the outlay, depending on the experience of the network technician using it. However, it lacks wireless functionality, which Fluke said will be available in 2005.

The 1.1kg EtherScope is powered by an Intel XScale PXA255 processor and runs the main Network Assistant application, among others, under an embedded Linux operating system. The sturdy casing features PC Card and Compact Flash slots as well as a serial and USB port and microphone and headphone jacks.

The EtherScope is very easy to use: plug in a cable to the LAN, power on the Etherscope and after verifying the LAN link, it automatically starts to probe the network. The main screen shows which tasks it has completed, which it is working on and any that require continuous monitoring.

The main application running on the EtherScope is the Network Assistant and one of the first things it does is to find out the different IP subnets, NetBios domains and IPX networks. In parallel with this it also finds the nearest switch, the top broadcasters on the network, the devices connected to the network, and identifies if any virtual LANs are present. It also produces a list of the top protocols being used on the network. In tests, when we plugged the EtherScope into one of our test networks, it flagged errors such as duplicate IP addresses and printers configured with bad subnet masks.

The touchscreen, together with the functionality of Fluke's Network Assistant application, makes it easy to drill down and pull out useful information. For instance, we could monitor the nearest switch and then check the utilisation of each of its ports and identify if there were any errors, or we could set up the EtherScope to measure bandwidth and error trends at intervals of 10 seconds, 60 seconds, 10 minutes and 60 minutes.

If there were problems with any network devices or we could not see devices we expected to see, we could launch one of the EtherScope's onboard tools to try to fix this. These tools include Ping, Trace Route, Telnet and a Linux Terminal.

The EtherScope's main application can also be accessed by another user if the technician needs to pass a problem to someone else - for instance to a network engineer. The engineer could connect remotely over the web and access real-time reports or any of the XML-based reports that can be saved to Compact Flash.

One minor shortcoming is that the software button to restart network probing is next to the "back" button. In our tests, it was quite easy to lose all the data we had collected when all we wanted to do was go back to the previous screen.

Price: £3,995 + VAT

Contact: Fluke Networks 01923 281334