Hi Karl,

Cant you just use specifications on phase stability of standard sources of 
varying degrees of stability which would be a function of price? What radio 
frequency are you working at. Tube sources tend to have good phase stability. 
There might be some old but goodies on ebay. There's also an HP user group 
https://groups.io/g/HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment where you might find a few 
low cost sources from those I keep the old kit working. Also a good source of 
technical data on radar technology and knowhow.

Cheers,
Neil    

-----Original Message-----
From: casper@lists.berkeley.edu <casper@lists.berkeley.edu> On Behalf Of Karl 
Warnick
Sent: 20 August 2024 21:38
To: casper@lists.berkeley.edu
Subject: [casper] Low cost phase noise analysis

Hi all,

I've spent some time this summer as part of a radar project digging into 
calculating phase noise for highly stable tones. I have implemented what I 
think is a decent algorithm. My next steps are to look for test data sets and 
tips for the hardware.

Do you have a file of samples of a stable tone? If anyone has a test data set 
consisting of samples of a pure tone that they would like to share as a test 
data set, I'd like to apply my codes to that and check the phase noise. Both 
the tone generator and the ADC sample clock should be phase stable to the order 
of a Keysight signal generator, or ideally better. The data set length should 
be a reasonable fraction of a second for ~1 Hz phase noise resolution. The 
frequency of the tone and the sample rate are fairly arbitrary as I'm mainly 
looking to benchmark the algorithm.

How cheaply can stable samples be acquired? I'm looking for low cost hardware 
(a few $100s up to a few $k) that is stable enough to measure phase noise 
comparable to a Keysight source or better. Phase noise can be measured with an 
expensive phase noise analyzer, but I believe it should be possible to do this 
with a low cost digitizer with a suitably stable sample clock. The sample clock 
could (or perhaps must) be external. The sample rate should be around 80-100 
Msps or higher and the platform should be able to store a burst of samples of 
length on the order of 1 sec. We have done this using a ZCU 216 and it seems to 
work, but that isn't really a low cost board. I've looked into Picoscope 
products, which might be ideal, but their support people don't know anything 
about the phase noise properties of their samplers.

Thanks in advance to anyone whose interest is piqued enough to respond.

Best,
Karl

--
Karl F. Warnick
Parkinson Engineering Research Professor Department of Electrical and Computer 
Engineering Brigham Young University
450 Engineering Building
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-1732





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