Hello Tom, it's pretty straight forward to calculate the effects of ground-loop due to cable loss; we can calculate this based on the impedance of the wire.
>From Wiki (search for AWG table) we get 16.14 Ohms/1000Ft, or 16.14mOhms/ foot for a 22 Gage wire. We have seen that the OCXO current varies by 4mA over a couple of days. This 4mA generates a ~65 microvolts delta across the ground wire. The OCXO we use has about 40Hz delta per 5V change in EFC, or 8Hz/V, thus we get: 8Hz/V * 65microvolts = 516 microhertz change due to ground loop, or ~5.2E-011. That's a fairly significant change just due to the ground loop. This change is linear to OCXO current, which we can see is inverse-linear to EFC voltage to keep the OCXO locked. So as the OCXO current rises, the voltage drop across the ground wire would increase, so the OCXO would see less EFC voltage on it's EFC pin. So it could theoretically actually reduce the thermal sensitivity of the system, since the OCXO EFC needs to go down with rising OCXO current as can be seen in the plots I had sent out earlier! BTW: the unit that was having large phase errors now stays locked within -10ns to +13ns, and has a SD of only 3ns over the last 52 hours. The unit now had enough time to learn, and is compensating very well now, you can see it in the attached plot or online. bye, Said In a message dated 2/8/2009 15:07:08 Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes: I still don't like unintended consequences. Did anyone try the experiment to move your OCXO off-board by a foot of cable? That might help isolate the root cause of the effect that you're compensating for. Also, do you know if all single/double OCXO show the same correlation of frequency output change vs. oven current consumption change? This might be relevant for anyone taking a Fury board and using their own external oscillator.
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