Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt

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Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt-Mark
Mullins
www.flukenetworks.com 2006-2017 Fluke
Corporation
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Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt
Maximizing productivity in today's fast-paced
workplace is essential. Whether installing new
fiber links or troubleshooting an existing
network, the faster you can locate a problem, the
faster you can fix it. That's easier said than
done when you are faced with a complex network of
fibers, connectors and patch cords. A visual
fault locator (VFL) is a great fiber diagnostic
tool in your belt for verifying continuity and
polarity and illuminating damaged connections,
breaks, defective splices and tight fiber bends
for exposed lengths of fiber in and around
equipment racks. And while an Optical Time Domain
Reflectometer (OTDR) is an indispensable tool for
finding problems large or small along the entire
cable length, it may be beyond the price range of
someone who only occasionally needs to figure out
where the fiber is broken. In other words, a VFL
might not be enough and an OTDR might be too
much. Like Goldilocks, sometimes you need
something in between that's just right.
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Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt
Filling the Gap
Let's say you've been called in to troubleshoot
a lengthy singlemode fiber link that runs through
a dense and complicated outside plant pathway
system that is not easily accessible. You know
the link is at least 8000 meters long, but you
don't know the exact length or the location of
the problem. Your VFL won't do you much good
since it's only capable of reaching a few miles
and the cable isn't accessible anyway. Your team
only has two expensive OTDRs that are being used
elsewhere for compliance testing on a new
install. What do you do? Fluke Networks' Fiber
OneShot PRO is the perfect tool to fill the gap
between a VFL and an OTDR. This lightweight
little tool measures the loss and reflectance of
loss incidents and tells you exactly where they
are located. And it maps all of the connections
by showing the distance to up to nine events on
links up to 23,000 meters, or 15 miles. And for
multimode, the Fiber QuickMap works the same way
up to 1,500 meters, or just under a mile.
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Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt
Just Right
While Fiber OneShot PRO and Fiber QuickMap work
like an OTDR in that they send light pulses
though the fiber and measure the power and timing
of light reflected from connections, splices,
high loss incidents and the end of the fiber,
they are much less complex -- and less
costly. With no complicated graphical trace
analysis, the tools are an easy-to-use first
response with intuitive one-button testing.
Simply turn it on and connect your fiber to the
connector on the unit (optional LC, ST and FT
interchangeable adapters are available). Press
TEST and in less than 6 seconds the display will
show the loss and distance of the first incident
detected. You can then press the up or down
buttons to scroll through additional incidents.
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Great Fiber Diagnostic Tool In Your Belt
Just Right
Just like any fiber cable testing, launch and
receive fibers will provide a view of the loss on
the first and last connections of the link under
test. A variety of launch and receive fibers are
available, including UPC to APC for testing
passive optical networks (PONs). And remember,
cleaning all fiber connections is still a
critical step -- the bulkhead connector on the
tester, connectors on the launch and receive
fibers and the connector on the cable under test
should all be cleaned (a task that Goldilocks
might neglect). So whether the problem turns out
to be a bad splice, severe bend, dirty connector
of something a bit more uncommon like damage from
a tree or one of the three bears, Fiber OneShot
PRO and Fiber QuickMap give you that little
something in between that's just right.
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