Wow! That is prety cool! It's amazing how cheap the fusion splicer machines have gotten. Many years ago I worked at a military base and we terminated a lot of fiber. Mostly used for 10baseFL (10 megabit over fiber) with some used for 155mbps ATM circiuts. It was all manual process, we had a tool to strip off the coating like they did in the video but then we had to inject epoxy into connector, shove the fiber through it, squirt stuff to harden it.. then cleave it manually with this stupid pen that had a cutting edge. That required a lot of luck. Took much pressure and it would break. Next step was to polish it on various films and then inspect it. Like 1 time out of 4 it had to be redone. A manager tried to convince the company to buy us a fusion splice machine which at the time was $25K but they wouldn't go fo it. These days I work only with pre-made fiber patch cables and active optical patch cables (25gigabit and 100gigabit.) We have a pretty high failure rate on the 100 gigabit active optical fiber cables actually. The other day I did get to help a friend on a DWDM setup though, that was pretty cool. I think it was doing 400 gigabit but could run 800 or 1200 gigabit total over a single mode fiber pair. Still don't understand all the things the magic fiber mux box was doing, it was more than a passive prism like I've seen before. - Ethan On Mon, 28 Feb 2022, Martin Flynn via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

Any interest in a hands-on demo for fusion splicing fiber? Would likely occur during a fall workshop, asking early to seek donation of consumables

Small group (no more than 8 people)

* Here's a demo from our fiber vendor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVvb6cmjds * Here's the dealer page for the splicer we would be using: https://splicerstore.com/fusion-splicer/fujikura-19s-fusion-splicer-s015679/ * If there's any interest, we may also go retro with cleave, epoxy,  and polish

Martin Flynn