So this is the first day exhibits are open and we can see new products but my first priority was Fiber Optics, for my upcoming tutorial. I talked with Neutrik about their F/O connectors and they offered me all sorts of art work and even video to help with my video. I see that all the rugged outdoor F/O connector incorporate some type of auto capping system where the optical ends are protected when ever the connector is not inserted to it’s mate to reduce the possibility of dirt blocking the light transfer.
Then it was on to Belden and their field installable F/O connectors. I saw these last year but now I’m much more interested. They can do many popular connectors in both Single Mode (SM) and Multi Mode (MM) cable. They gave me a demo of how it works which I taped on my iPhone for the tutorial. Belden does not recommend their connectors for permanent install as the loss,or attenuation is much higher than a Fusion splice. Each connector is about $10 to $14 each but can be used up to 5 times. I think we should get a kit from them for the tower now that we are working in F/O so we can quickly make up cables in house while we wait for factory built ones.
There’s a lot of small F/O to video adapters now, not much bigger than RG-11 coax cable in thickness. Now these would be converting video to analog light, by which I mean the brightness follows the amplitude of the video signal (analog video). For SDI I guess it can be just flashes, or digital, which is what most F/O is these days.
The difference it that if you send analog light you really need angled F/O ends. This is where the end of the fiber is at a 5° to 8° angle and mates to the same degree end. This reduces light reflections at the connector, for digital light this does not seem to matter as the reflected light is bounced back down the Fiber to the transmitter, where it bounces again back to the receiver. This causes noise in the received signal, but with digital light, you know, just on-off-on-off the reflections and thus the noise is not a problem. So today there’s not much call for angled ends in F/O.
I then talked with Emcore who makes a lot of F/O equipment for broadcast. They just resently announced a 120Gbps fiber cable, WOW!
Over at Advanced Fiber Products I saw the first Self Normalizing Optical Patch Bay, now that’s a feat. I still don’t quite understand how they are doing it but they assure me it does. They also have a unique system of Fiber to Coax adapters that you can monitor via a Web GUI. Some come with a readout on top as well and even that can be remoted to a near by panel.
I was over at Evertz to get more information on how to install their L-Band Router. We plan to start with a 64 x 64 but to leave room for expansion for up to 128 x 128. I want to make sure I put the equipment in the right places in the rack and not have to move them later. Then I was over at ETL Systems and to look at their L-Band router, it’s bigger than Evertz but it also comes with some stuff external, like the LNB power supplies, where as the Evertz is integrated. Not a bad system, and it’s used a lot.
On Tuesday it’s off to a Dielectric breakfast and a talk with Yellow Brick and their F/O offerings.
To see pictures of NAB 2012 take a look at my NAB board at Pinterest - http://pinterest.com/theole/ and keep up to date by checking out my Twitter Feed here - http://twitter.com/#!/theOLEOrg
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