In recent years fiber Bragg grating sensors gained interest in structural health monitoring and concepts for smart structures. They are small, lightweight, and immune to electromagnetic interference. Using multiplexing techniques, several sensors can be addressed by a single fiber. Therefore, well-established structures and materials in industrial applications can be easily equipped with fiber optical sensors with marginal influence on their mechanical properties. In return, critical components can be monitored in real-time, leading to reduced maintenance intervals and a great reduction of costs. Beside of generally condition monitoring, the localization of failures in a structure is a desired feature of the condition monitoring system. Detecting the acoustic emission of a sudden event, its place of origin can be determined by analyzing the delay time of distributed sensor signals. To achieve high localization accuracies for the detection of cracks, breaks, and impacts high sampling rates combined with the simultaneous interrogation of several fiber Bragg grating sensors are required. In this article a fiber Bragg grating interrogator for high frequency measurements up to the megahertz range is presented. The interrogator is based on a passive wavelength to intensity conversion applying arrayed waveguide gratings. Light power fluctuations are suppressed by a differential data evaluation, leading to a reduced signal-to-noise ratio and a low strain detection limit. The measurement system is used to detect, inter alia, wire breaks in steel wire ropes for dockside cranes