Traditional fiber optical connector has already proven to be unreliable in harsh environmental or military field applications due to their sensitivity to dirt, mud, water, oil and other contaminants. Fortunately, expanded beam fiber optic connectors offer the solution. Expanded beam fiber optic connector, see at the figure, is specially designed for quick and easy deployment in rugged and harsh environment, they adopted a non-contact technique where the fiber is sealed behind a lens completely and make to reduce dirt sensitivity. Tactical optical cable assembly from Fiberstore just uses this feature for someone who needs to deploy in rugged and harsh environments, it is designed for field communication and CATV, single solder quick distributing and retrieving, LAN cabling and so on.
The tactical optical cable assembly provides the connections between FOMs (fiber optic modems). It just means that the fiber optic modems provide electrical to optical conversion of electronic communication and data signals for transmission using the tactical optical cable assembly. We can know that the tactical optical cable assembly consist of plugs terminated onto cable and the panel amount receptacles come into two designs, jam nut and flange mount which can be deployed, as for the tactical special optical cable connector at the both ends of fiber optical cable, it is referred as expanded beam fiber optic connector which just mentioned in previous paragraph, this fiber optic connector are usually terminated onto tactical cable according to MIL Srandard 83526 and they are fully sealed mated or unmated and with and without dust caps fitted. With hermaphroditic connectors, there is no requirement for male/female adapters and therefore both ends can be used equally. Such cables are supplied with hand reels or vehicle reels depending on the length of the cable. The length of cable can be 200/300/500/1000m in Fiberstore. See at the figure. It consists of radiation-hardened multimode or singlemode optical fibers enclosed in an out jacket of flame retardant polyurethane. An inner strength laid of aramid yarn ensures superior tensile loading and crush resistant properties. Typical tactical cable assemblies features can be summarized as the following:
- Full range of connectors using expanded beam, physical contact and third party termini and connectors.
- Multimode or singlemode cable.
- 1 to 16 optical channels.
- Fiber optic/copper hybrid assemblies.
- Custom lengths.
- High quality military tactical cable.
- Wide range of deplorable cable reels.
In terms of military applications of fiber optic communications, they are very strict with the fiber cable, so its design, development and manufacturing has been a quite difficult problem to solve, such as it need special connector and different material to protect the safety of the soldiers, therefore, the difficult point of fiber optic telecommunication is to produce high performance fiber optic cable. In fact, early during the Gulf War, the Allies had already used tactical fiber optic communication systems.
Nowadays the rapid developments of science and technology, Humans’s military thinking is changing. Information war will be main combat in the next years, therefore, military forces throughout the world are racing to develop the high-tech related information war. Military optical fiber communication must achieve rapid development in the future.
