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Making Measurements
Using the Agilent 83430A
Example Uses
Testing optical receiver sensitivity
You can use the Agilent 83430A to measure the minimum sensitivity of an
optical receiver. The following figure shows one possible test setup which uses
the following equipment:
• Agilent 83430A
• Agilent 71603B error performance analyzer
• Agilent 8156A Option 121 high performance optical attenuator with optical
monitor output
• Agilent 8153A optical power meter
The bit error rate (BER) is monitored as the power to the optical receiver is
reduced. The minimum sensitivity limit is found when the BER increases to
some pre-determined level above which the receiver performance is unaccept-
able. Because the Agilent 83430A is a SDH/SONET compliant transmitter in
its preset state, the measured BER performance (1
×
10
–10
for SDH/ SONET
system) determines the sensitivity limits of the optical receiver.
The following figure shows the sensitivity of the Agilent 83446A/B lightwave
clock/data receiver as the optical receiver under test.