This part of IEC 61280 is intended to characterize the encircled flux of two types of light sources: transmission light sources, which are usually coherent and substantially under-excite the mode volume of a multimode fibre, and measurement light sources, which are incoherent and excite most of the mode volume of a multimode fibre.

This part of IEC 61280 sets forth a standard procedure for the collection of two-dimensional fibre optic nearfield greyscale data and subsequent reduction to one-dimensional data expressed as a set of three sampled parametric functions of radius from the fibre’s optical centre. This revision of IEC 61280‑1‑4 continues to fulfil its original purpose, characterization of transmission light sources, which enables the accurate mathematical prediction of minimum guaranteed link length in 1 gigabit per second or greater fibre optic data communication systems. New to this revision is support for improved measurement precision of insertion loss in multimode fibre optic links through the characterization of measurement light sources.

Estimation of the fibre core diameter is not an objective of this standard.