For characterization purposes, fiber optic components must often be measured according to standard specifications or customer and project specifications depending on the behavior of their optical properties, such as insertion loss or return loss.

Long-term tests indicate the maximum lifetime of the component, whereas climatic chamber tests indicate its aging or sensitivity to environmental conditions. Dropout tests provide information on the behavior of the components in the event of earthquakes, strong mechanical shocks, use under extreme environmental conditions, and in high bit-rate transmission paths, which could possibly fail in the event of dropouts.

OptoTest’s OP740 is a high-speed solution for multi-channel optical fiber power measurement. This device allows up to 125,000 samples per second with up to twenty-four fibers. In contrast to other systems, a separate, independent test unit is used for each fiber. This not only increases the speed but the accuracy of the measurement results as well. The relative measuring accuracy of the OP740 is ±0.02 dB. Thanks to this combination of high sampling rate and accuracy, even short signal dropouts in individual fibers can be detected as part of a dropout test.

Features:

• Up to twenty-four connections per U2 rack
• Four-color touchscreen display
• Color-coded pass/fail results
• Measuring range
  InGaAs: +6 dBm to -72 dBm
  Silicon: +3 dBm to -65 dBm
• Wide wavelength spectrum
  InGaAs: 830 nm to 1700 nm
  Silicon: 400 nm to 1100 nm
• Relative accuracy of 0.02 dB

The OP740 is used wherever fast optical performance monitoring of many channels is required. For example, when manufacturing couplers with a coupler drawing machine, the cores of several fibers are fused together and heated and processed until the correct division ratio is achieved (overcoupling of the evanescent field). This is best achieved when all outputs of the splitter can be monitored simultaneously. Numerous other applications for fast detectors can be ideally covered with the multi-channel OP740.

In combination with the OPL-LOG software, this device is ideally suited for long-term tests (e.g., when the behavior of fibers is to be tested over several weeks in a climatic chamber).