> Mike > You've obviously never tried this, in practice its noise is a lot > higher than you think, perhaps 2 orders of magnitude worse than a > double balanced mixer.
> You need to breadboard this and do some tests. > Bruce Bruce, Thank you for the reply. Please let me introduce myself. I know this circuit very well. I've been using it since 1970, where it formed the basis of development work that led to my second patent, US 4533881. Among other things, this patent was the first to recognize the problem of deadband in the PLL phase/frequency detector, and shows how to fix it. People still get it wrong even today. That patent led to an amazing discovery, documented in the paper: "Effect of Bitshift Distribution on Error Rate in Magnetic Recording", Eric R. Katz and Thomas G. Campbell, IEEE Transaction on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-15, No. 3, May 1979, pp 1050-1053. This technique saved the hard disk drive industry hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. It did this by separating the contributions of the head, media, preamplifier, servo system, disk defects, external EMI, and anything else that affected the error rate. It gave manufacturing a very quick test to tell if a drive was meeting the error rate spec, and tells what to do if it failed. It also gave head and media manufacturers a way to measure the performance of their products, and a way to meet the competition that was using the same technique. It told R&D engineers how well their design was working, and what to do to improve it. It had a tremendous effect on every disk drive company on the planet, and there were over 220 at the peak. I made a great deal of money developing test systems that used this technique for manufacturers all over the world. I owned a house in Saratoga Hills in Silicon Valley. I had two Mercedes and three Lexus for my managers, and gave a bunch of Toyota station wagons to my staff so they wouldn't have problems getting to work. I helped most of my staff buy houses. I bought this plane brand new, Piper Malibu N4360V. http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=5874208&nseq=0 This is a twin turbocharged with constant speed prop, pressurized, retractable, six-place high performance aircraft with a service ceiling of 25,000 ft. That is above most of the weather, and I put over 750 hours on it flying to customers all over the US. It was truly the nicest plane I have ever had the pleasure to fly, but you have to watch it on takeoff when the turbos spool up. The torque will take you into the weeds if you are not ready for it. It is very nice to see it is still in the air:) All of this resulted from work using the circuit I described above, so I know it pretty well. It works a lot better than you think it does. It also forms the basis of two of my latest inventions, which will be disclosed as soon as I have time to get my new web site up and running. The old site was finally taken down by Microsoft, so I can't give you a working url. But at this moment, searching for the phrase "binary sampler" in quotes gives me the first four hits in google, so you can see it was up until recently. Unfortunately the WayBack machine doesn't link to images, so I can't send you there to see how it works. But I should have the above circuit running around Christmas, along with some other new stuff. I'll be happy to discuss these issues when there is hardware to make measurements on. Best Regards, Mike Monett _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
