Nothing too deep this morning. I'm just wishing I had access to an expensive piece of test equipment -- or that I had been able to hunt up the much cheaper flashlight-and-light-meter gadget we used have at work. There's a piece of damaged, multi-strand fiber optic cable about seven hundred feet up in the air -- it's supported on a structure, though not one I can climb, I'll send up a professional -- and I need to determine if it's a little broken, or a total loss.
This could be interesting.
You know no one but a tech or an engineer is going to have any idea what a TDR is, I presume.
ReplyDeleteIf it's damaged, and has been in place for years, why not just replace the whole thing?
ReplyDeletePolymer-plastic cable jacketing only does one thing over time, and that's degrade...
Because it is just shy of eight hundred feet long, mostly vertical. The labor to string new fiber is non-trivial.
ReplyDeleteA strong light source at the top and a Mark One eyeball at the other end shows it to be intact.
20 years ago, I had a hand in making such a thing. Was high-tech and expensive back then... out of curiousity, I searched ebay figuring that 20 year-old tech would be pretty cheap. Oh My. I'm astonished that there isn't a dirt-cheap alternative out there. It's not like the speed of light has changed any since then.
ReplyDeleteAh, OK.
ReplyDeleteEgads. OTDR rentals are over 500 a week. And the same or more for a tower crew.
Not fun...
Intact is not the same as functional, when it comes to fibres. What it does determines how detailed your checking must be. You probably already know that, I suspect. Splicing them was a job I detested.
ReplyDeleteThis ought to work -- it's pretty low bandwidth as fiber goes, a single 1080i video link one way and serial data the other.
ReplyDelete