Knowledge base · Measurement
The splice that seems to gain: where the minus comes from and why the reverse shot fixes it
There is no such thing as a passive amplifier: a splice cannot add light. Yet an OTDR sometimes reports a negative loss at one — and that is neither an instrument fault nor bad splicing. It is what a joint between two fibres of differing backscatter coefficient looks like.
What matters more than the minus itself is what stands behind it: if one joint reads off in one direction, then every other joint on that fibre is measured off too — merely not far enough to flip the sign.
What the OTDR actually measures
It does not see the splice. It sees the level of light the fibre sends back — before the joint and after it.
Backscatter is a property of the fibre
How much light a fibre returns to the instrument depends on the fibre itself: its core, its aperture, its batch. Two lengths off different drums return different amounts even across a perfect splice.
The instrument takes a difference of levels
Joint loss is the difference between the level before and the level after. If the fibre past the joint returns more than the fibre before it, the difference comes out the other way — and the trace shows a step up. No energy was added: what changed is the share that came back.
The error changes sign with the direction
Connect from the other end and the same backscatter mismatch enters the measurement with the opposite sign. Hence the cure: measure from both ends and take the mean. The mismatch cancels and the real loss of the joint is left.
Why the mean, and why exactly the mean
Write the true loss of the joint as S and the backscatter mismatch of the two fibres as ΔK. From one end the instrument reads S + ΔK; from the other, S − ΔK. Add the two and halve them, and ΔK is gone: S remains. This is not an approximation or a smoothing but an exact cancellation — provided both measurements are of the same joint.
Hence the consequence that matters more than the formula: a one-way figure is always incomplete, not only where a minus appeared. At every joint it is overstated at one end by exactly as much as it is understated at the other. The minus is simply the case where ΔK grew larger than the loss and turned the sign over.
This is why acceptance testing checks splices from both ends even when the total link loss passes. A one-way measurement answers «what does it cost to traverse the link this way»; a two-way one answers «what is this splice».
How to do it here
Open both traces — the forward one and the reverse — in the workspace and press Pair with the reverse trace. The direction is not recorded in the file: no instrument we know of writes it, so which of the two is the reverse is for you to say. What follows is a joint table where every joint carries its own figure, the reverse figure, and the mean of the two.
Apart from the table, the reverse curve can be laid on the chart with Reverse trace: it is drawn mirrored, so its metres read from the far end, and aligned at cursor A. The size of that alignment is written in the legend — without it, a level could be read off the curve that does not exist.
We also check what stands in the way of pairing: if the two sides were computed with different indices of refraction, their distances live in different systems, and we say so before you start matching closure numbers. The same for a differing backscatter coefficient — that mismatch is precisely what the mean removes. And where the instrument recorded no loss on one of the sides, there is no mean at all: half of one side is not an average, it is the same one-way figure halved.
Next
Averaging cures a backscatter mismatch, not everything else: different acquisition settings, different pulse widths or different indices of refraction on the two sides produce a discrepancy the mean will not remove but hide.