Measurements of the characteristics of optical fibre amplifiers

The authors firstly propose a series of standard characterisation methods of OFAs which would allow a true comparison between different amplifiers, and go on to describe in more detail a number of such measurements. The automatic control of standard test equipment for measuring the three most important parameters of an OFA via a GPIB interface is also described. An erbium-doped fibre amplifier with an electronically tuned bandpass filter in a feedback loop was used as a tunable laser. Using this method, automatic measurements of small signal gain, saturation characteristics and noise figure may be performed in a single experiment