How Does Fiber Identifier Work In Your Fiber Optic Network

by Fiber-MART.COM

Fiber Optical Identifier is an essential installation and maintenance instrument which can identify the optical fiber by detecting the optical signals transmitted through the cables, during this process the fiber optic identifier do no harm or damage to the fiber cable and it also don’t need opening the fiber at the splice point for identification or interrupting the service.During fiber optic network installation, maintenance, or restoration, it is also often necessary to identify a specific fiber without disrupting live service.

 

The Fiber optic identifier have a slot on the top. The fiber under test is inserted into the slot, then the fiber identifier performs a macro-bend on the fiber. The macro-bend makes some light leak out from the fiber and the optical sensor detects it. The detector can detect both the presence of the light and the direction of light.

 

A fiber optic identifier can detect “no signal”, “tone” or “traffic” and it also indicates the traffic direction. The optical signal loss induced by this technique is so small, usually at 1dB level, that it doesn’t cause any trouble on the live traffic.

 

Fiber optic identifiers can detect 250um bare fibers, 900um tight buffered fibers, 2.0mm fiber cables, 3.0mm fiber cables, bare fiber ribbons and jacketed fiber ribbons. Most fiber identifiers need to change a head fiber optic adapter in order to support all these kinds of fibers and cables. While some other models are cleverly designed and they don’t need to change the head adapter at all. Some models only support single mode fibers and others can support both single mode and multimode fibers.

 

Most high end fiber optic identifiers are equipped with a LCD display which can display the optical power detected. However, this power measurement cannot be used as a accurate absolute power measurement of the optical signal due to inconsistencies in fiber optic cables and the impact of user technique on the measurements.