Hi

My intent was certainly not to stop anybody from doing anything with what they 
have. My concern is that this is a lot of work for modest return. A simple 
single mixer setup for  $20 would dramatically change things….

$3 mini circuits double balanced mixer
$3 op amps x 2
+/- 15 V supply you already have (hopefully).
$5 for a piece of perf board
$3 for 3 BNC connectors. 
$3 left over for resistors and capacitors. 

Offset the local reference one hertz or so and let the 5334 do it’s thing. Your 
resolution is now plenty good enough to see what’s happening. 

Circuit:

Mixer driven by your two sources
L/C filter between the mixer output and a positive gain op amp (OP-37 or 
similar)
Op amp set up with enough gain to give you 28V p-p when the mixer is saturated 
(OP-27 or similar)
Next op amp run as an inverter / limiter and driving the counter, use diodes in 
the feedback path to do the limiting. 

Not the most elegant circuit. Not the highest resolution possible.  Cheap / 
easy to build / simple to troubleshoot. Used a *lot* of times by a *lot* of 
people. 

If you want to get fancy terminate the mixer in 500 ohms at audio and 50 ohms 
at RF. Fancier still is to do some single pole R-C high pass / low pass in 
front of the first op-amp. Neither one adds much cost. They do make it slightly 
harder to build. 

To totally blow the budget go with an RPD-1 mixer rather than one of the simple 
ones. Termination would then be 500 ohms at RF and 5K at audio.  

Bob

Yes, I’m assuming you get the mixer at the hamfest / 20 piece price rather than 
just ordering one at a time from Mine Circuits.



On Feb 6, 2014, at 6:52 PM, Tom Van Baak <t...@leapsecond.com> wrote:

>> Simple answer - doing this directly with a counter is not the best approach. 
> 
> Most of us work with what we have. I think it's pretty cool what Bob is doing 
> with a 5335A. Someday he may buy or build something better. Your best may not 
> be his best, or my best. What is best at one tau is not at another. Time-nuts 
> has never been about being best (otherwise we all loose to USNO); it's about 
> learning and exploring this interesting field of time & frequency with what 
> we have at home, whether it's the ADEV of 60 Hz or ADEV of a 5335A/GPSDO, etc.
> 
> /tvb
> 
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