Testing Fiber for Optical Loss and it’s process
When you test fiber optic cable for optical loss, the fiber testers will need to be connected to a test source to provide a calibrated "0 dB loss" reference with the optical light standard. A power meter that is present at the opposite ends of the circuit will calculate the light source with and without the testing of the fiber to quantify the loss in dB of the fiber itself. The importance of a optical thin film coating on precision optical components is highly important because the optical components gets exposed to the environment and their efficiency gets decreased, to know more about it visit pfg optics.
There are some other methods to test the fiber optic cable connections include both receive cables and launch cables connected to the power meter. This is the standard test for damage in an installed cable plant and includes loss measurement at both test cable connection ends. For this reason, making sure that all the connections are fully clean and it is an important aspect of any fiber test. In order to test the optical loss, an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) can also be used as a fiber optic cable tester. Using high-intensity laser light emitted at pre-determined pulse intervals via a connecting cable at one end of the fiber optic cable run, the OTDR instrument analyzes the backscatter of the light returning to the source location.
This test method of one-ended fiber can be used as a fiber optic tester to find the location of losses in fiber optic during the maintenance, installation, and troubleshooting and quantitatively analyze the loss. Mini-OTDR products pack the functionality of a mainframe OTDR device into a handheld fiber test product and can integrate other capabilities such as fiber end inspection, VFL, and power measurement.
Origins of Fiber Optic Test:
There is nothing new in the concept of transmission of the optical signal through thin glass fiber. Over 100 years ago, experiments showed the ability of light to travel through a curved glass substrate and retain most of its original intensity. By the end of the 1960s, three technologies ultra-transparent glass fiber, laser optics, and digital signaling gathered to build up the foundation of fiber optic communication networks. Fiber optics technology works by converting electrical energy into light or optic energy. These signals can be transmitted through long fiber optic runs to a receiver at the far end of the line, where the signal is converted back to its original binary form