Topband: Light fiber question

[John Kaufmann]

There are niche applications, called "antenna remoting", where photonic and
fiberoptic technologies are used to transmit RF signals from an antenna to a
remote receiver.  You can buy commercial systems to do this.   I once
designed such a system for a government application to send RF signals from
microwave antennas to receivers that were up to 10 km away.  These
applications exploit the advantages of optical fiber, namely (1) extremely
low loss compared to conventional RF methods that use coax or other copper
media, and (2) the extremely wide bandwidths (thousands of GHz) that can be
supported in fiber.  That's why the telecom industry now uses fiberoptics
for commercial networks, particularly for WAN applications.

However, optical fiber solutions make sense only when the application pushes
the limitations of conventional RF transmission techniques like coax or
twisted pair.  I honestly can't imagine any lowband amateur need where this
would be the case.  And optical solutions come at a cost.  High performance
optical transmitters and receivers that provide low noise and high dynamic
range do exist but they are not cheap by amateur radio standards.  

It's much easier and far less expensive to make coax (or twisted pair, if
you prefer) work properly.

73, John W1FV