by Greg | Jan 3, 2011 | Equipment
I just got of the phone with the nice folks at Legacy Fiberoptics. We were discussing an upgrade of a few of our OTDRs. Starting January 2011 they will be offering upgrades for the CMA4000 OTDR which will outfit your OTDR with a removable compact flash. Here are a few questions and answers concerning the upgrade. Q1. What is it? A. The CMA4000 Compact Flash solution is a replacement for the internal hard drive and floppy drive that originally came with the CMA4000. Traces are stored on a removable compact flash card, rather than the internal hard drive or 1.44MB floppy disks. The compact flash card can then be inserted into the supplied USB reader and plugged into the target PC. This allows for easy transfer to a PC and eliminates the need for 1.44MB floppy disks. Q2. Why did you do it? A. The 1.44MB capacity of the floppy disk makes the transfer of trace data from the CMA4000 to a PC a time consuming process. Other than the serial port (which is equally slow), that was the only way to get a hard drive full of traces off of the CMA4000 – one disk-full at a time. To put this into a little perspective, transferring 144MB of trace data off of a CMA4000 would involve copying data to a floppy disk over 100 times! As it’s a manual process, the time used just for copying data can add up significantly over the course of a year. Q3. How do you do it? A. When the CMA4000 is sent in, we remove both the internal hard drive (if...
by Greg | Dec 26, 2010 | Testing
OTDR trace data They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the OTDR picture, or “trace” as they are called, takes a lot of words to describe all the information in it. The image to the left illustrates a common distance measurement data of a fiber optic strand. Click on the image to get a bigger version. The screen shot shows the OTDR setup parameters including things like pulse width, range, wavelength and average points of data acquired. Likewise, data such as the length of fiber optics and 2 point loss (db) is also shown. Equipment used to acquire trace : CMA 4000 GN Nettest Networks infoBit – If the fiber looks nonlinear at either end, especially near a reflective event like a connector, avoid that section when measuring fiber...
