I've been following the thread about Erik's DIY PN analyzer, and wondering if it might be easy enough to use a frequency discrimination method. I'm opening this in a different thread to avoid muddying the water on the original (and long) one.

What I'm picturing is putting the DUT's output into a quadrature power splitter that optionally has a voltage-tuned slight phase shift feature. The I and Q outputs would go into the DBM and produce the nearly-zero DC plus baseband signal for analysis as in the original story.

If the quadrature is precise and stable enough, the DC out should be close to zero, and since the baseband is ultimately AC coupled to the analyzer, small offset should be OK, within reason.

If this is not sufficient, then having a phase tuning feature could be used to form a PLL to hold the DC at zero. The big difference here is that instead of locking a separate reference source to the DUT, the relative phase at the mixer just has to be fine tuned to maintain the output DC. The same sorts of PLL requirements are encountered to get the results, but no external reference (and its noise and lock range etc issues) is needed.

The downside is that a different quadrature splitter would probably be needed for each DUT frequency to be applied - I'm picturing ones for 5 and 10 MHz initially. Those 90 degree broadband splitters that Mike mentioned seem very interesting too.

There is still the necessity of calibration, either way.

Ed
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com
To unsubscribe send an email to time-nuts-le...@lists.febo.com

Reply via email to