End-of-Life Insertion Loss Methodology

The MT ferrule is a commercial part that has been adopted by the aerospace community. Extensive testing has shown that, in a single-mode application, the MT ferrule exhibits excellent performance. Interestingly, the military fiber optic connector (MIL-T-29504, MIL-C-38999) exhibits much worse optical performance than the commercial part. No industry standard exists on how to sum measured environmental losses to measure EOL insertion loss to create a worst case operating scenario. We have presented here several different methodologies for calculating EOL insertion loss based on summations of individual tests.