Yes, I am aware of that. Bayonet and threaded connectors can be mated, or partially mated as I said. This applies to BNC, C, N, HN, TNC, SMA, APC-7, and MS at least, but not to LEMO and some families of military and commercial multipin connectors.
Improper mating can easily be seen on a VNA, and can sometimes destroy a TWTA if it is not protected with an internal isolator. Normally FO connectors have their faces lapped very flat and exactly normal to the fiber axis. If they are not lapped properly or mated properly, the insertion loss increases dramatically. It was happenstance that the OPERA connector was mated enough to work, but not enough to work properly. -John ============ > On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 6:23 PM, J. Forster <j...@quikus.com> wrote: >> Frankly, I'm a bit surprised at the connector problem. Much of High Energy >> instrumentation uses LEMO connectors, which have a definite "click" when >> mated. They are not like BNCs which can be mated, without locking. > > It was an optical bayonet-type connector, not an electrical one. Changes in optical power induced by the loose connection resulted in big changes in delay through the mechanism of charging and discharging the capacitance associated with the photodiode. At least that is my crude understanding of the matter, > >> I rest my case. You simply cannot inspect in quality. > > It's hard to disagree with this statement. Who doesn't like quality? I was trying to go a bit more concrete and suggest that redundant > systems, especially based on alternative technologies, can help catch errors which may have gone undetected using other means, like > inspection and other sanity checks. In fact, if you have experience with space electronics I think I don't have to convince you of the benefits of redundancy, as well as of the fact that the probability of making mistakes is never 0. If you think about it, this whole issue was solved thanks to redundancy: there was another experiment in the same lab which detected cosmic muons, and it was through the > correlation of the muon detections between the two experiments that the slip between time bases was discovered. I think redundancy is a good complement, not necessarily a substitute, to other quality > assurance methods. > > Cheers, > > Javier > > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.