Several years ago I spotted a clever PIC-based software (DSP-ish)
approach to WWVB modulation - but it has thusfar defied my attempts to
find it via Google. It was from the late 90's, early 2000's - and I may
have it in an archive somewhere.
The exact details escape me, but I believe that it sampled at 8 kHz and
was fed a crystal-filtered WWVB signal at 60 kHz, putting this
bandwidth-limited, AGC-leveled signal directly into the PIC's A/D.
If I've done my math correctly, that would yield a frequency-inverted
alias at 4 kHz. The A/D was then mixed and/or decimated significantly
and a simple software-based carrier recovery scheme (a Costas loop,
maybe?) was implemented in this rather low-end PIC. Because the TRF
bandwidth was on the order of just a few Hertz, it took a fairly trivial
amount of horsepower to implement.
Presumably, at just one baud it should be practical to do this on more
modern PICs and AVRs using the same scheme. The trick to homebrewing
this is to find a 60.003 kHz crystal - but one of these could be swiped
from a WWVB receiver module, or, perhaps, a source-follower could be
used to recover the phase component of the received carrier, tapping off
the signal from the BPF itself and making it available to the processor.
* * *
Another scheme - one that I believe was poo-poohed a while back on this
list - is to simply take a bandpass filtered sample of around 60 kHz and
throw it into a four-quadrant multiplier to yield a 120 kHz signal sans
phase shift. I believe that the initial critique of this was that this
was not a particularly good way to recover a weak signal, but I found it
to be quite useful on a project some (15) years ago.
On this project, I had a 100 kHz pilot carrier modulated with NRZ BPSK
telemetry data and this same carrier was used to convey the reference
frequency to multiple, simulcast transmitters via a 33cm microwave
link. At 100 kHz, I simply had an L/C bandpass filter that was roughly
3-5 kHz wide on the transmit (to control the occupied bandwidth when
XOR-gate modulated) and a similar filter on the receive end.
"Listening" to this 100 kHz center frequency, 3-5 kHz bandwidth was a
1496 configured as a multiplier, the output of which was passed through
a simple filter constructed using 200 kHz crystals. The 200 kHz from the
doubler output was then divided-by-two and used to synchronously
demodulate the BPSK data (after being filtered with either a Bessel or
Gaussian LPF) and this same recovered 100 kHz signal was then made
available to the master 10 MHz frequency reference for locking.
What impressed me was the fact that my input signal S/N could go about
40 dB below the detection bandwidth of the BPSK signal and still
maintain perfect lock on the 100 kHz carrier, despite the fact that the
1496 - which really doesn't make all that great of a doubler compared
with other available (but more expensive!) devices was being pelted with
3-5 kHz of garbage when the S/N was purposely compromised. IIRC, the
detection bandwidth of the crystal-based carrier recover filter was on
the order of a few 10ths of Hz. Yes, the phase did vary with
temperature, but the rate-of-change was fairly slow and this fact was
inconsequential in our application.
* * *
The upshot of this is that it should be quite easy to do a simple
doubler-based carrier recovery system at 120 kHz (or something else, if
it's frequency-converted) and, since it may be a bit tricky to find a
cheap 120.006 kHz crystal, use an SCF clocked from a VCXO (or a simple
fractional divider/DDS implemented in software) to provide a very narrow
detection bandwidth that would satisfy the dynamics associated with the
usable signal range over which the WWVB carrier could be reconstructed
and the phase data could likely be recovered. The AM output of a
standard WWVB clock module could then be used to aid in the windowing of
a synchronous demodulator integrate-and-dump filter to recover the phase
information and make these two pieces available to something like a PIC
or an AVR/Arduino for crunching.
In the (likely!) event of a signal that was too weak to recover the
amplitude information from the broader-bandwidth WWVB receiver module it
should be practical to oversample (say, by 8x) the output of the
synchronous demodulator and then infer the timing of the phase change
over a period of time since the minimum period of this is well known (1
second!) and such timing could be (initially) autonomously applied with
very good stability until the timing of the phase change resolved itself
- something that could be correlated with a statistical analysis of the
output of the amplitude detector, as well.
To a large degree, this sounds like a candidate for a "front end"
consisting of good old 4000 CMOS logic and a few op amps with the output
handed off to a fairly low-end, cheap processor module!
73,
Clint
KA7OEI
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