Cisco ONS 15454 E3-12 & E3/DS3 loopback testing

Question

I was wondering if it was possible to daisy chain all the ports (with a hard loop on the last port) on the FMEC E3/DS3 and create circuits between the looped ports in order to perform BER testing on all the E3 ports.
I set that up and connected my test set, but when start sending a signal I end up getting a LOF alarm.
Does anyone have any ideas on what my problem may be and how I would go about performing my test for all the E3 ports?

Answer 1

based on your test set-up.. did you create circuits between all the ports and then use a physical loop (fiber connections between the ports) on all the ports?
I have it set up with circuits on the backplane and physical loops in the following manner:
test set -> port 1
port 1-> port 2 (VC3 circuit)
port 2-> port 3 (physical loop)
port 3-> port 4 (VC3 circuit)
port 4-> port 5 (physical loop)
port 5-> port 6 (VC3 circuit)
port 12 -> port 12 (physical loop)
When i have this set up and traffic running from my test set , i keep getting LOF alarms on my test set.
However for some reason it works for only 2 ports... anything past 2 ports seems to be unstable and i get alarms..
Any ideas?