R.C. Schimmel, R.J.W. Jonker, P.K. van Bennekom, G.D. Khoe and H. de Waardt

We have investigated the system performance of an experimental Praseodymium Doped Fibre Amplifier (PDFA) in an optical transmission system operating at 1.3 m. Experimental evaluation of the PDFA, based on Bit Error Rate (BER) measurements, is presented for the PDFA in copropagating and bidirectional configurations as a function of both wavelength and optical input power. The performance is analysed for both NRZ and RZ modulation format at a bitrate of 10 Gbit/s. The polarisation dependency of the PDFA is less than 0.2 dB