Is the 1 Hz difference signal the one you want, or do you want the sum? The sum will include 10.000001 MHz but also 9.999999 MHz, and 10.000002 and 9.999998 and 10.000000, and so forth, and a whole lot of other products - basically the sums and differences of every fundamental and harmonic of every frequency involved, at various levels (and phase). For investigating this, it's best to use a spectrum analyzer too. The scope can see the envelope of the modulation, but not the frequency content.

The 1 Hz difference signal is easy to LPF out, but the sums have lots of stuff close together, nearly impossible to separate with filters. If you start with a quadrature mixing scheme, you can get much better rejection of what you don't want, but there will still be plenty of spurious stuff, because it can't be done perfectly - as always, it depends on how good it needs to be.

I'm guessing the objective is to make a 10 MHz +/- 1 Hz offset reference frequency. Unfortunately, it's very difficult with simple or even fancy up-converting analog mixing and filtering. Better to use a fundamental XO at that frequency, or a DDS, or start with frequencies way higher than the 10 MHz, that can be mixed down to the 10 MHz range, and readily filtered out. Most of the garbage you don't want will be much higher up, and a LPF can be made as good as needed to reject it.

Depending on your 5 MHz sources, a good possibility, presuming they can be tuned or PLLed, is instead of adding them, just set one for say 1/2 Hz away from 5 MHz, then double it to 10 MHz +/- 1 Hz, which will be way easier to separate from the fundamental and higher harmonics with a BPF.

Ed

_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to 
http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
and follow the instructions there.

Reply via email to