Wayne Kachmar has been in the optical cable industry for over four decades. He has participated in many innovations and unique projects to provide optical cable in diverse environments such as the underwater ROV that penetrated the Titanic, as well as cable that is in service sensing sub-atomic particles in the Antarctic ice.
Wayne developed a number of unique concepts and products using optical fibers as both information carriers and sensors where the cable became the sensor. These have included fiber laser ring gyroscope components and distributed acoustic sensors for terrestrial and underwater applications.
As a principal investigator for many government sponsored projects, he has developed methods that push the state of the art in optical cable design and manufacture. Over his career, Wayne has been able to fuse this state of the art knowledge with conventional fiber cable design to significantly cost reduce both materials and processes.
He holds over 50 granted patents in fiber optic cables, connectors and tools and over 60 patents published or in process.
Wayne is President and Owner of Technical Horsepower Consulting, LLC
and Optical Cable Technical Expert for Fiber Optic Center, Inc.
Looking back at the fiber optic cable industry over two to four decades, I notice the trend, as in everything, is to make each device smaller and more feature-filled. This is true in connectors, cables, transceivers etc. Perusing my collection of old fiber
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What we do vs. what we wish to do‚ thoughts on the realistic integration of next-generation fiber optic technologies. Today, fiber optic communications have been firmly established. We install networks both in the switched telephone and CATV networks with...
Are we doomed to repeat the past? Not letting our industry’s critical “tribal knowledge” become lost. As more colleagues from my generation move toward retirement, I am concerned that the collected knowledge we gained empirically is not fully being preserved
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One of the questions I often get from fiber optic cable manufacturers is: “Which specifications do I have to qualify to?” Additionally, I often hear: “Why is it that this particular specification is not good enough? Why can’t one spec fit all?”
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One of the questions I get asked about regarding optical cable measurements is: “Why don’t my OTDR and jacket length markings agree?” The answer depends on the type of cable being made. In the old days (when you and I were a lot younger) the normal procedure
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When I was a process engineer at a large cabler, we could reconfigure our fiber optic process lines in about 20 minutes. In a 3-shift day, we could produce 8 different products. Unfortunately, most cablers don’t enjoy this level of efficiency.
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A growing trend in the fiber optic industry is the increasing use of specialty fibers. Clearly, telecommunications and data communications applications are the high-volume users of fiber optics, yet other areas are burgeoning. In fact, many specialty fiber
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In the “dog-eat-dog” world of raw materials, competition is stiff. Margins are tight. Opportunities are rare. Is your company eyeing fiber optics as a new market? If you’re a raw material supplier looking to sell to the optical cable industry, keep reading.
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I am seeing a trend in the fiber optic industry: Cable manufacturers around the world are looking to develop and qualify cable designs in order to enter the US fiber optic market. Unfortunately, I am witnessing another trend: Many cable manufacturers don’t
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Many times I have had the conversation about how to get started in cable manufacture or get a new extrusion line up quickly. Invariably two questions come up: How quick can I be in production and what equipment do I need? That quickly is followed by...
