like you said, it really depends on things like the passes in your slip ring. Also, depends on the architecture of the vehicle and whether or not the vehicle employs cwdm (coarse wavelength division multiplexing).
The ACV takes all data and video up optical fibre because it uses cwdm (multi-wavelengths along same optical fibre using little bragg fibre gratings to combine them) and cwdm topside so it gets the extra bandwidth that way. I don’t even think they need to use the quads provided in the standard tether/QD.
On some basic and early inspection vehicles (seaeye Panther for example); only video is put exclusively up a multimode optical fibre and data comes in via conductor.
Horses for courses.
You’ll find that single mode is best for long range communications where you don’t want intermodal dispersion wrecking your data error rate.
(Multi-mode – lots of small slightly different optical paths for the light to take, hence a short pulse in one end, spreads out in time). Beam spread will vary with disturbance of the fibre shape too. This ultimately limits propagation length; hence multi-mode – cheap (but still has acceptable high data rates), single mode – expensive, higher data rates over longer ranges.
from Fugro:
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Super spartan: multimodes x 6
Triton: multi-modes x 8 – 3 optical fibres could be used in slip ring.
MRV5: (looking at spec- 12 multimode fibres in 2 x 6 fibre bundles) is this for real? How many optical channels in the slip ring?
FCV3000: single modes
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