Video Monitoring System Using a Standard Polymer Optical Fiber Lyubomyr V. Bartkiv 1 , Yaroslav V. Bobitski 1 , Hans Poisel 2 1 Department of Photonics, Lviv Polytechnic National University, Lviv, Ukraine, lbartkiv@polynet.lviv.ua, bobitski@polynet.lviv.ua 2 POF Application Center, University of Applied Sciences, Nuremberg, Germany, Hans.Poisel@pofac.ohm-hochschule.de Abstract: A video monitoring system using a standard polymer optical fiber has been elaborated. The schematics of an optical transmitter and an optical receiver of video signal were designed. The transmission characteristics of video monitoring system were examined. The developed video monitoring system has transmission bandwidth of 6 MHz and very high S/N ratio nearly 50 dB. Introduction Transmission of video- and television signals in TV broadcasting, CATV, remote control and monitoring of guarding objects is one of perspective directions for today. Copper cables and optical fiber cables are commonly used as transmission medium in such systems. Comparing these two communication media, the optical fiber cables have more advantages when used in data transmission systems. Significant advantages of optical fiber cables over copper cables are wider transmission bandwidth, lower transmission losses, longer transmission distances, immunity to electromagnetic disturbances, small size and weight, and also enhanced safety and privacy. The last advantages are extremely important at transmission of video signals in systems of video controlling and monitoring of guarding objects. 1-5 Unlike all advantages of optical fibers for data transmission, optical fiber video signal transmission systems, which are available on the market, have a number of lacks. High costs of both components and based on its systems are the main obstacles on a way of their wide application. This is connected mainly with the use of single-mode optical fibers for video signal transmission. Since the transmission distances in such systems in prevailing majority do not exceed 1 km, an effective solution in such a case could be the use of multimode optical fibers, especially of polymer optical fibers. Polymer optical fibers have many advantages thanks to their great diameter. First of all, the accuracy requirements to connections are greatly decreased. Moreover, the cost of the components of data transmission systems is considerably reduced. Taking into account all advantages of polymer optical fibers it is possible to predict, that video signal transmission systems using a polymer optical fibers could compete even with traditional video transmission systems on the basis of copper cables. The approach described above has been taken into account by Luceat company from Italy. 6 It had developed and produced the converters for video transmission over a polymer optical fiber. For the moment Luceat is a single company in Europe which produces the video transmission systems using a polymer optical fiber. We also had target to develop a similar video transmission system which would have a lower cost and good performances. The results we obtained will be described in this paper. Design of Video Monitoring System A simple fiber-optic video monitoring system consists of optical transmitter, optical fiber and optical receiver and often called as “point-to-point” video system. Such a fiber-optic link has to be able to transmit a video signal from a remote video camera to a video monitor over an optical fiber. To ensure a high quality of the received video picture on monitor screen the fiber-optic link for video signal transmission has to have enough transmission bandwidth and receiver gain for a given transmission distance. If an optical fiber is given and allows transmission bandwidth for specified distance with reserve this parameter is dependent only on the optical transmitter and the optical receiver. The last ones in that case are the key components in such video system and should be particularly designed. As transmission medium in video system a standard polymer optical fiber will be used. Transmission bandwidth of that fiber allows transmission distances which do not exceed of a few hundreds of