The development of a multisensor optronic device requires Size, Weight and Power (SWaP), cost-effective and modular rangefinders while keeping a good range performance. We report on a fully fibered monostatic laser rangerfinder based on a one lens collimator used as the aperture of both the emission and reception channels. This has been possible thanks to the use of a diplexer.
This design makes the system compacter and achieves a 200g system weight. In addition to its low volume, the fully fibered architecture allows designing a building block rangefinder with the collimator sub-system on one side and the laser and electronics cards module on the other side. Both are linked up by only an optical fiber. This kit format enables the rangefinder to better fit in any available space in higher level systems such as gimbals and multi-function imagers. Besides, no alignment is needed, and no parallax error is possible: the alignment between channels is guaranteed by design over the whole range.
The emission/reception channels of the first prototype has a 28mm diameter 80mm focal length lens, and a 1.55μm 100μJ pulsed laser firing in a burst mode. The rangefinder is set in a class 1 configuration, and measures at 1Hz. The achieved Extinction Ratio is 30dB, which is equivalent to a range on NATO targets of 7km. The achieved ER being class 1M at 5Hz is even 32dB, which is equivalent to a range of 8.5km on NATO targets.
More configurations are reported in this article with their associated performance.
Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) metropolitan networks are currently being extensively deployed with distances ranging from a couple of ten’s kilometers to several hundred kilometers. 40 DWDM channels are commonly used; each of them is carrying today Ethernet or Fiber Channel traffics ranging from 1 to 10 Gb/s. This type of network requires achromatic components, for which the provider can fix the operating wavelength in order to have the same type of components in the consumer’s home. The DWDM sources could be based on a tunable laser source or on a selfseeded- reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) as recently proposed. In this last case, the RSOA is coupled to a mirror, located at a few kilometers in a central office. A frequency filter fixes the wavelength. The RSOA is then directly modulated at a few GHz. However even if a 100 GHz-wide filter is used, a much narrower slot of wavelengths is selected on the “red” side of the transmission window of the filter. This communication gives from a Green function approach the modal structure of an RSOA coupled to a long cavity with strong optical feedback and explains how such coupled structure is operating.
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