(mostly for entertainment value)
As the talk fell on what is a weekend project for timenuts, here is my
Easter project.
I have previously built a few GPSDOs with my own home-rolled OCXOs. The
VC-OCXOs are a problem: I run into linearity problems, noise, the
residue of the flux changing with time, and DAC drift. Voltage control
is annoying.
So, I built a PLL that will take a 14.7456MHz inaccurate non-adjustable
OCXO (something that does not have a large common denominator with
20MHz) and generate 20MHz with 1E-12 or arbitrarily better resolution.
The method is this:
A microcontroller is clocked from a 20MHz VCXO. It samples the 14.7MHz
using a flipflop (something I did before), calculates the phase from a
number of samples (211ps resolution single shot, 22ps multiple),
calculates the predicted phase at the phase acquisition time (it turns
rapidly as there is a 5.3MHz beat), and uses the difference to lock the
20MHz VCXO.
The whole thing, with the exception of the VCXO, is software.
Stepping the synthesizer in 1E-12 steps is strangely satisfying. So is
plotting the noise, as the VCXO is deliberately awful; The close-in
noise (30ms tau) is the VCXO done with the microcontroller's built-in
oscillator, above that it is that of the OCXO.
http://n1.taur.dk/timenuts/synth_v2.pdf
(2-hour very much draft version - you may want to skip to the very last
page)
Probably not a new design, but I did re-invent it.
Proper measurements will have to wait a few weeks.
/Kasper Pedersen
_______________________________________________
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.
