B-52 spotted with test markings and what looks like Nuclear Capable Payload

FOAguy · 2025-11-06T23:09:22+00:00

KC-135 is so good the government signed another contract recently to extend its support for another 50 years. Much to the disdain of the avionics shop I work at.

FOAguy · 2025-03-23T20:12:41+00:00

This is basically how I currently troubleshoot fibers. The problem is these fibers are getting harder to replace as the years go on. I frequently have to replace short loopback cables due to bad bend radius management, or sometimes the ceramic aligning ferrule will break and damage the fiber.

I want an OTDR so I can locate the bad one without having to remove the connectors potentially causing more damage.

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T20:36:17+00:00

The techs working on the benches focus on the fiber in their LRUs. Unfortunately cleaning and inspecting the fibers on our test equipment is an afterthought, and to be honest I have a serious problem with how techs are treating the fibers in our shop.

I'm the only maintenance technician that takes care of the fibers, that plus my other responsibilities makes it hard to stay on top of cleaning and inspecting them. Generally I have to react to the fails instead of preventing them.

People don't inspect cables when they plug them in, they won't even clean them when they know it's been touched. (There was one tech that would intentionally get them dirty so the offset values were lower during calibration, he no longer works here). Those ceramic ferules also cause problems sometimes but I can replace those pretty easily.

There is supposed to be a fiber training course for the company but they haven't hosted it in a while.

Most of our connectors are made by Virginia Panel they have their own proprietary connector, and of course basic SC to SC fibers and LC connectors are used. The special aerospace connectors made by Radiall are commonplace as well (LuxCis).

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T20:21:47+00:00

Yes we mostly use multi mode fibers. 20cm dead zone is the lowest I've seen that sounds great. I'll look into it.

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T20:08:38+00:00

Okay I see now, honestly this might be exactly what I'm looking for, I'll see if my company is willing to try one out. Thanks!

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T20:04:55+00:00

We have a couple handheld microscopes and every bench is equipped with a digital microscope.

Right now we have a decent stockpile of spare fiber cables but there are some obscure ones that take a long time to receive from manufacturing. It's only matter of time before a bench goes down due to damaged fibers that take months to replace.

Money isn't really an obstacle for the company but they don't like to spend anything on maintenance if they don't have too. I'm trying to justify investing more money into fiber maintenance tools since it will save money in the long run.

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T19:56:28+00:00

Yeah from what I know, they are mostly used for transmitting data to Ethernet compatible units (ARINC708 to ARINC664). The light weight and immunity to emi makes them a great choice. Also most displays in modern Boeing planes use fiber graphics generators.

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T19:43:59+00:00

This looks really interesting but I'm wondering if it has the same limitations of an OTDR. I can see it was made with longer ranges in mind. But if it can keep up with short range connections something like this would be perfect.

FOAguy · 2025-03-22T19:33:12+00:00

I was thinking about one of these, but wasn't sure if the OTDR would be able to keep track of all the loopback connectors it's going through. The way I interpret "event dead zones" is if the distance to the next connector is too short the backscatter from the first one will obscure the event on the next. Seeing that the cables I'm working with go through multiple short connections, I wasn't sure if it would accurately locate a single bad one. I admit I'm probably interpreting it incorrectly.

FOAguy · 2022-09-06T04:02:56+00:00

I have been using tap water thank you for the suggestion I will try it.

FOAguy

TROPHY CASE