Fiber-optics are firmly established as the dominant medium of terrestrial
telecommunication infrastructure. Many excellent references and textbooks
which treat this subject in great detail are available. Most of these books
cover device and systems aspects of digital fiber-optic transmission. For this
reason, digital fiber-optic systems will not be a subject of discussion at all
in this book. In the current communication infrastructure, a sizeable portion
of “access” traffic is carried by Hybrid-Fiber-Coax (HFC) infrastructure [1]
which employs subcarrier transmission1 (essentially an analog format)2 to support
both CATV3 and cable modem Internet access. A similar situation exists
in some military radar/communication systems where personnel and signal
processing equipment is remoted from the physical antennas which are often
in the way of homing weapons.