Column Control DTX

Transient Optical Power Measurements

Application Notes

Measuring optical power level changes, to determine fiberoptic switching times or to observe transient fluctuations from fiber movement or network reconfiguration, goes beyond the design of most fiberoptic power meters. These instruments are generally designed for calibrated determination of optical power levels that are constant or change in synchronization with other instruments. The typical sample rates like 10 kHz, data capacity of perhaps 100,000 samples, and the data transfer speed to the controller are often insufficient for general time-dependent measurements. Instead, alternative setups such as a fast opticalto-electrical converter combined with an oscilloscope, have been used and described in standards. These often sacrifice optical power calibration, involve additional integration effort, and are often implemented with an over-dimensioned scope bandwidth.

The N774-C family of optical power meters, successors to the widely used N7744A 4-port and N7745A 8-port optical power meters, offers the performance to make these measurements with a small selfcontained programmable instrument that is used together with a controller computer. These power meters accurately log optical power at selectable sample rates and support fast LAN or USB data transfer. Parallel measurement and data transfer provide continuous power monitoring without interruption. Threshold-triggering has also been added to activate the power logging measurement at signal-change events. This application note describes how to make and program these measurements.

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Column Control DTX