Design and characterization of a fiberoptic RF remoting link

This paper describes the design and characterization of a fiber optic link developed to route received RF signals from remotely located S-band telemetry systems to a central processing and recording facility. This fiber optic system demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of linking RF data from multiple antennas via a single fiber and over a nearly 100-km distance. Measured data of key link parameters such as gain, bit-error-rate, crosstalk, phase and gain stability, dynamic range, and noise figure are presented.