Atec Agilent-8169A User Manual
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To Match Your Application 
Requirements 
 
Ease of Use, Flexibility and Speed 
 
Four adjustment techniques enhance the ease of 
use, flexibility and speed of the Agilent 8169A. 
 
• Precise manual adjustments are made while 
watching the front-panel display and adjusting 
the front panel knobs. 
 
• Nine Save/Recall registers enable random and
rapid SOP hopping between nine different, 
user-set states of polarization. 
 
• Autoscanning continuously sweeps over all
states of polarization, tuning the SOP across 
the entire Poincare sphere. Multiple 
polarization scan rates are available to match 
the speed of the application; be it a five-
second, single-wave PDL measurement or a 
three-minute, wavelength-scanning PDL 
measurement. 
 
• Autoscanning rates are also fast enough to
produce polarization scrambling for some 
applications. 
 
Remote interrogation of all instrument settings 
and remote control of all adjustment procedures 
are provided via GPIB. 
General-Purpose Polarization Controller 
For a Wide Range of Applications 
 
The Agilent 8169A Polarization Controller offers 
general-purpose performance for a variety of 
applications: 
 
• Polarization synthesis 
• Complete and automatically stepped
adjustments of polarization over the entire 
Poincare sphere 
 
• Swept wavelength polarization-dependent loss
measurement (Mueller method) 
 
• Fixed-wavelength “min-max” PDL
measurements 
 
• Polarization-dependent gain measurements for
EDFA 
 
• Polarization sensitivity measurements
• Optical waveguide TE/TM mode testing
• Polarization adjustment of optical launch
conditions for polarization mode dispersion 
measurements 
 
Measurement systems are created by combining 
the Agilent 8169A with other Agilent instruments.