Laser diode pumped Er/sup 3+/-doped fiber amplifier in a 565 Mbit/s DPSK coherent transmission experiment

A laser-diode-pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier, exhibiting 9-dB gain, has been operated as an in-line optical repeater in a 565-Mb/s coherent optical communications system. A sensitivity penalty of 0.4 dB was observed when the amplifier was positioned 35 dB away from the receiver, thus indicating a system improvement of 8.6 dB. By progressively reducing the coupling loss between amplifier and receiver, the noise figure of the contradirectionally pumped amplifier was calculated to be 5.4 dB, a value which is consistent with simple noise theory.<>