Hand-held OTDR and Fiber break locator

Hand-held (formerly mini) OTDRs and fiber break locators are designed to troubleshoot fiber networks in a field-type environment often using battery power. The two types of instruments cover the spectrum of approaches to fiber optic plant taken by the communications providers. Hand-held, inexpensive (compared to full-feature) OTDRs are intended to be easy-to-use, light-weight, sophisticated OTDRs to collect field data and perform rudimentary data analysis upon. They may be less feature rich than full-feature OTDRs. Often they can be used in conjunction with PC-based software to perform easy data collection with the hand-held OTDR and sophisticated data analysis with the PC-based software. The hand-held OTDRs are commonly used to measure fiber links and locate fiber breaks, points of high loss, points of high reflectance, link end-to-end loss, and Optical Return Loss (ORL) for the link.

Fiber break locators are intended to be low-cost instruments specifically designed to locate the position of a catastrophic fiber event, e.g., fiber break, point of high reflectance, or high loss. The fiber break locator is an opto-electronic tape measure that is designed to measure only distance to catastrophic fiber events.

In general, hand-held OTDRs and fiber break locators are lighter and smaller, simpler to operate, and more likely to operate using battery power than full-feature OTDRs. The intent is for hand-held OTDRs and fiber break locators to be inexpensive enough for optical technicians to be equipped with one as part of their standard tool kit.

August 5, 2011

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