Second Factory Acceptance Test Visit

12 Jan

Mat Shields overseeing Repeater Testing at ASN manufacturing plant.

In the second of a series of planned visits, Mat Shields, Vocus Communications Technical Lead for the CS² project, visited ASN’s manufacturing plants in Greenwich, England, to undertake a series of quality assurance (QA) and manufacturing progress assessments.

Over the course of a week in January 2019, Mat reviewed manufacturing plans, engineering specifications, test plans and test results, as well as witnessed factory acceptance testing (FAT) for a variety of the equipment destined for the CS² project. This included:

testing of the power switched branching unit (BU) that allows the cable from Australia to split into two branches - one branch terminating in Papua New Guinea and the other in Solomon Islands;
a review of all repeater specifications and QA documentation as well as testing of a sample of the repeaters destined for the cable system. The repeaters amplify the optical signal at regular intervals along the cable; and
testing of the power-feed equipment (PFE) destined for Honiara, Solomon Islands – PFE is installed in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands and provides power to the repeaters in the cable.

Mat’s final visit to Europe will be in March 2019 to witness the load of the completed cable system onto the main cable lay vessel in Calais, France, prior to its departure to the Coral Sea.

You can also read an update on Mat’s first visit to ASN’s facilities in December 2018.