UEA offers compact slip ring designs with our Alpha Series that combine power and communication into one simple package. With a small envelope, UEA offers a wide variety of ways to pass communication from A to B with ethernet, CANBUS, and Fiber Optics.
For the Alpha Product line, we implement FORJ (Fiber optic rotary joint) units into our existing slip ring designs. Fiber optic is an updated alternative to passing communication via ethernet cables and is a more reliable, much faster, and simpler way to communicate with various devices.
Ethernet is the industry standard for use over short distances that require an average level of speeds of communication via electrical current. The new and improved method is Fiber optic, which is ideal for longer distances without loss, and allows for 10X faster speeds to be sent over that distance using light instead of power.
Current applications using Ethernet max out at 10 Gbps speeds, which may be ideal for some applications of our customers. Current applications using fiber max out at 100 Gbps speeds which is ideal for near-instantaneous signal transmission requirements.
Since fiber uses light to pass the data through long distances instead of copper wire, it results in much lower loss values.
Many UEA customers use cameras for viewing live feeds from underwater research, fast communication from thousands of feet in the air to a computer on the ground, and instantaneous feedback from a tool many miles into the core of the earth to the operator. With these applications, it is imperative that the information being sent and received between the 2 locations is as reliable, fast, and durable as possible to perform their respective tasks effectively and efficiently.