On Wednesday 26 July 2006 12:38, Mark Foster wrote: Hi Mark,
What do the players on here use? Laser filter goggles or somesuch I presume? Any brands or types reccomended / preferred?
Of course due care should be taken to make sure theres no active laser emmitters on the other end of the feed, but beyond that, nice to be protected. Recommendations from the floor?
As JSR said, "do not look into laser with remaining good eye". A few months ago I actually had an engineer from a well known systems integrator tell me that the long-haul single mode link we were working on couldn't possibly be working because he couldn't see any light coming out of his end of the fibre. He honestly thought the system used visible frequency light and had looked down the patch lead for it. I've never seen people working on fibre using goggles or anything like that. Basic common sense seems to serve. Never, ever, look into a fibre with or without a scope unless you can directly see both ends of it. Never connect a light source to a fibre unless you know what is going on at the other end. Use light meters to test levels, if you suspect a fibre is dirty clean it and retest with a light meter rather than scoping it if you can't see both ends of the lead. Beware of highly reflective surfaces when handling live fibres. Always, always, cap the ends of leads and the in/outputs of GBICs as soon as they are disconnected. This helps keep crap out of the connections as well as keeping things safe. Don't assume that because a port is administratively disabled or has no link that it isn't emitting. We have kit that never turns off the lasers, regardless of the state of the link, which came as a surprise when we encountered it. There is a little bit of info, primarily aimed at lab kit here: http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/reports/lasersafety/sc1.htm#8.4 The ITU apparently have some published best practice documents, but I don't know what they are. -- Al http://where.else.net.nz