Abstract: A method of calculating a transmitter and dispersion penalty for predicting optical link signal quality includes providing an optical link; capturing an averaged eye, using an optical test signal sequence to drive the transmitter with an oscilloscope receiver having an oscilloscope bandwidth as available; and from the averaged eye, capturing histograms A1; capturing a non-averaged eye using an optical test signal sequence to drive the transmitter, and from the non-averaged eye, capturing histograms B1; de-convolving histograms A1 from histograms B1; filtering waveform from step 1), convolve the filtered waveform from step 4) with the estimate of the noise from 3); and calculating “soft” TDP based on the probability distribution function.