What Equipment Is Needed For Tone Remote Over Fiber Optic?

[bcooper]

What equipment and costs is needed for tone remote to an MTR2000 using fiber optic cable? This is for a CATV company that has its own fiber optic cable from its office to the tower site. Currently they are using a mobile radio as a base station with a yagi antenna aimed at the repeater, but there is occasional trouble with interference from other stations on the same frequency, which is extremely crowded (trouble is on both talk-in and talk-out). Any help is appreciated.
Walter

[psapengineer]

I can think of two ways to do this. I'm going to assume that the fiber is single mode since it is used for an "outside plant" installation. You will also need to know the fiber route distance to pick the right laser.

1) You could buy two T1 shelves like those made by telco systems (24FC19) off of E-Bay, provision them with 4W TO (4 wire Transmission Only) modules in one slot, and then connect them to a T1 to Single Mode media converter like those made by Transition Networks. In this case you will need a -48V supply for the T1 shelves.

2) You could buy two VoIP to 4W converters such as those made my Multitech. Then, they could be connected via their ethernet port to a media converter on each end, 10BaseT ethernet CAT5 to Single Mode Fiber (also made by Transition Networks).

Either way, it would likely be more economical to lease a telephone company dry pair or R3002 grade voice circuit as opposed to lighting the fiber. You could ballpark 1) at $5K and 2) at maybe 4K unless you find some bargins out there. So, at $50mrc for a leased line with nrc install of $300 the payback is something like 70+ months so it doesn't have a business case to light the fiber.

Don't forget the "catch 22" effect of using your own services; if the fiber is cut, and you need to call the crew, you can't because the fiber is cut.

Good Luck, Bob

[mastr]

Is the cable plant capable of doing a "return" to the headend?

[k2hz]

You did not indicate if this will involve activating "dark" fibers dedicated to this or if there is some existing 2-way digital capability on their existing system.

If it is dark fiber, then psapengineer's comments covered it pretty well. I recently worked on a proposal for a small municipal utility that got dark fiber rights from a cable company in exchange for pole attachment rights.
They wanted 2 circuits from the town hall to the base station site, one for public safety and one for the utility.

We looked at about the same things described in his post and came up with options that ranged between 10K and 25K+ when installation labor and materials were included. It was not cost effective vs the existing lease line for the public safety and a control station for the utility UHF repeater.

If there is some existing 2 way analog, digital or IP connectivity on their existing cable system equipment, then there may be more reasonable alternatives.

[bcooper]

Thanks for the input. There is already an IP network between the office and tower site, so the VoIP to 4W sounds the best at this point. Which Multitech unit would work for this setup? There are also available dark fibers.

[psapengineer]

I don't know the model number. I'd contact Multitech for some "pre-sales" suupport and let them tell you the correct model numbers.
Good Luck, Bob