I have always been fascinated trying to figure out just how they splice two lengths of fiber-optic cable together and make all those tiny connections work.
“I have always been fascinated trying to figure out just how they splice two lengths of fiber-optic cable together and make all those tiny connections work”
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It looked easy enough when Sean Connery did it in “Outland.”
“I have always been fascinated trying to figure out just how they splice two lengths of fiber-optic cable together and make all those tiny connections work.”
It can be a pain in the keister!
It has gotten much beter but not too long ago it could take an hour to glue, polish and TDR test a single fiber. Of course the more you do it the quicker you get. Now days they have kits that make it much quicker.
We were installing a bunch of multimode (24 fiber) runs about a kilometer of length. The vendor was spooling it off and laid it across what was supposed to be abandonded railroad siding...
An train engine came along and cut the fiber in about 6 places. The vendor was PO’d. At that time Fiber was EXPENSIVE...
I’ve seen it done before. Basically, there’s a little machine that lines up the two ends of the fiber and then literally melts the two ends together. The amazing thing about it is the junction between the two fibers is nearly lossless after the “weld”.
It's magic.
The "cable" consists of an armored jacket around a single fiber. The fiber is made of ultra pure glass to minimize the attenuation of the signal and usually has a graduated index of refraction which bends the light pulses toward the center of the fiber. The splices are thus held to a minimum as a single fiber may be several kilometers in length.
The splices themselves are done in a traveling "clean room" and require the fiber ends to be cleaved as square as possible and polished before joining.
Regards,
GtG