This one comes from a real day I just lost.
One of my techs was testing in another state. He finished the job, all 24 fibers shot and saved, and started packing up. Then he looked at the files. No cable ID. No Site A. No Site B. Just a generic fiber ID on every trace.
His plan was to go back and retest everything. A full day of work to fix a labeling problem.
I told him to send me the files instead. He emailed them over, I opened each one, typed in the cable ID, Site A, Site B, saved it, and moved on to the next. 24 files. Between the emailing back and forth and the one-at-a-time editing, we lost half a day.
Then, after it was all done, I remembered something. I'd been building a tool that does exactly this.
Why this happens
Every OTDR has a setup screen. Cable ID, Site A, Site B, fiber number, operator, job info. You fill it in before you shoot, and every trace saves with the right identifiers.
Some techs fill it in every time. Some forget. Some fill it in on the first cable, then the OTDR keeps auto-incrementing through the second cable and now half the files carry the wrong IDs.
Either way, the result is the same. The traces are good but nobody can tell what they are. The engineer can't build the acceptance report. The customer can't verify what was tested. The job won't close.
And the old answers are both bad. Retest everything, or open every file one at a time in the native software.
Three ways to fix it
VIAVI software. If your traces came off a T-BERD, you can open them in VIAVI's desktop software and edit the identifiers. One trace at a time. One field at a time. It works, but 24 files is a couple of hours. There's no bulk edit.
EXFO software. EXFO can handle bulk updates. Select a batch of files in FastReporter, edit the common fields once, apply to all. If you're an EXFO shop with the software installed and licensed, this is the fastest native option. The catch is the same as VIAVI: it lives on a laptop with the software installed. Not on the truck. Not on your phone.
The trace editor at johnstonetechs.com/trace-editor. Open .sor or .trc files in your browser, edit the identifier fields, save the corrected files. No install, no license, no account. Works on anything with a browser. Your files never leave your device, same as the fiber analyzer.
And it does bulk. Load the whole batch, set the cable ID and site names once, apply to everything. The 24 files that cost me half a day would have been a couple of minutes.
Fix your traces now. Open the trace editor in your browser — no install, no account, files never leave your device.
Open the Trace Editor →How I ended up building this
I didn't set out to build a trace editor.
I was polishing and testing the fiber analyzer, and I needed sample traces I could share publicly. Real traces have customer data in them. Cable IDs, site names, job information. Before I could use any of them as samples, I had to strip that out.
So I started tinkering with a way to edit those fields without opening the native software every time. And somewhere in that tinkering it turned into a working editor.
Sometimes you have to trip over your own solution before you see it.
Reading traces, not relabeling them? The Fiber Trace Analyzer opens the same .sor, .msor, and .trc files and shows span length, loss, reflectance, and a full event table — free, in your browser, files never leave your device.
Open the Fiber Analyzer →What's coming
Renaming files from their identifier fields — so the file names finally match what's inside them — just went in. Next I want templates, so a job's identifiers can be entered once and saved for reuse across jobs.
If you use it and there's something you need it to do, tell me. That's how the analyzer got better, and it's how this will too.
The short version
If your traces came back with missing or wrong identifiers, you don't have to retest and you don't have to install anything. Open them at johnstonetechs.com/trace-editor, fix the fields, save, done.
The testing was good. The labels were the problem. Fix the labels.