[vcf-midatlantic] Slightly OT - demo for fusion splicing fiber?

[Ethan O'Toole]

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
>
>
>