User Manual

Users Guide - Andrew InCell™ Fiber Optic Distributed Antenna System
6-3
Installation Warnings
• Damage! – Observe the minimum band radius of the fiber optic cable. Ensure that the
cable is never bent with smaller than a 2-inch bend radius. The cable may be
permanently degraded or may be weakened in a way that may cause failure later on.
• Damage! – Angled (APC) and non-angled (PC) connectors should never be mated. This
will result in permanent damage to both connectors and will also result in significant
signal degradation due to air gap loss between connectors.
• Warning! – The lasers can cause severe eye damage. Do not look directly into the
connectors on the front panel of the CDU, ERAU or into a connected fiber optic cable.
• Damage! – Do not use cable tie wraps to secure fiber optic cables as tight wraps can
cause microbends that weaken or break the optical cable and degrade performance. Also
avoid laying fiber optic cable on sharp corners or allowing the weight of the fiber optic
cable to pull the cable down onto a sharp corner.
Testing Cables
• Testing cables requires a light source and an optical power meter. All test equipment
must have SC/APC connectors. If the test equipment does not have an SC/APC
connector, a high quality, low loss jumper cable with an SC/APC connector must be used
to interface the test equipment to the cable under test.
• An LED based light source used to test multimode fiber optic cables will not work. A
light source with a laser at 1310 nm wavelength must be used to test the single mode
fiber cables.
• Ensure that all connectors are cleaned properly as described in the cleaning section.
Calibrate out all losses between the laser light source and the power meter including all
adapter jumper cables.
• Cable assemblies provided by Andrew have been tested and are shipped with the cable
test data. If installing cable assemblies, making loss measurements of the cables before
installation is a good practice.
Cleaning Connectors
Clean fiber optic connectors are very important for high performance system operation. Always
keep fiber dust covers on the ends of fiber cables and on the CDU and ERAU. Before installing
cable into the equipment, always clean the connectors use the following process:
• Use only 95% pure alcohol or ethanol to clean fiber optic connectors. The 95% pure
alcohol can be purchased behind the counter at most pharmacies.
• Use only lint free tissues dipped in the alcohol to clean the end of the fiber connector.
Dip the tissue in the alcohol and clean the connector end. Use dry air spray to dry the
connector end.