Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Optical TDR?

     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.

7 comments:

  1. You know no one but a tech or an engineer is going to have any idea what a TDR is, I presume.

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  2. If it's damaged, and has been in place for years, why not just replace the whole thing?

    Polymer-plastic cable jacketing only does one thing over time, and that's degrade...

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  3. Because it is just shy of eight hundred feet long, mostly vertical. The labor to string new fiber is non-trivial.

    A strong light source at the top and a Mark One eyeball at the other end shows it to be intact.

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  4. 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.

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  5. Ah, OK.

    Egads. OTDR rentals are over 500 a week. And the same or more for a tower crew.

    Not fun...

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  6. 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.

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  7. This ought to work -- it's pretty low bandwidth as fiber goes, a single 1080i video link one way and serial data the other.

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