Experimental study on the 1550 nm all fiber heterodyne laser range finder

In this paper, a 1550 nm all fiber monostatic laser range finder system based on linear chirp modulation and heterodyne detection is presented. The fiber end face signal is used as a range starting indicator. The transmitted laser power is 5 mW with a laser pulse length of 131 mu s and a linear chirp bandwidth of 40 MHz. The telescope with an aperture of 3 cm couples the return light into a single mode fiber. Better than 14 cm distance accuracy and 26 dB SNR can be achieved for a wood target at a distance of about 43 m by using the above system setup. Several experiments with different system parameters are conducted. The system performance is tested under variable laser pulse length, linear chirp bandwidth, local oscillator power, and background noise. Finally, an application of the linear chirp modulation heterodyne laser range finder in a spaceborne ranging system is proposed. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America