Power Feed Equipment for the SL Undersea Lightwave Cable
01 January 1988
The PFE (Power Feed Equipment) for the SL Undersea Lightwave Cable converts 48 volt battery power to a constant current of 1.6 amperes at voltages up to 7500 volts to power the undersea amplifiers. Two series aiding SL PFEs at opposite ends of a cable can supply 33.6 watts of power to each of 100 or more undersea amplifiers in a transoceanic system spanning thousands of kilometers. The high volume of traffic on such a system (40,000 telephone circuits) requires judicious use of redundancy to achieve high reliability.