[time-nuts] Re: Accuracy of a sound card
Alberto di Bene
dibene at usa.net
Tue Aug 23 12:28:38 EDT 2005
Ulrich Bangert wrote:
>Because it is a differential measurement between the two channels (which
>are sampled exactly the same time due to the adc hardware) the first
>idea was, that the effects introduced by the not so good sample clock of
>a ordinary sound card may cancel out completely.
>
>
Beware ! The above is true only for high end cards. I learnt it the hard
way. I am the author of SDRadio, a software that implements the concepts
of a software defined radio. The sound card is fed with the quadrature I
and Q components from a QSD (quadrature sampling detector) and the
rejection of the unwanted side band is done by the program using the
phasing method. This requires a precise phase difference of 90 degrees
between the two components. On my and many other PCs the program worked
ok, but I received a few reports saying that the unwanted band rejection
was terrible. After some investigations it turned out that between the
left and the right channel of the sound card there was a fixed time
difference ( a few tens of microseconds, if I recall correctly).
This forced me to implement a fractional unit delay routine, as the
usual phase correction techniques didn't work in this case, being of
course the phase error depending on the frequency.
I don't know the reason, but my suspect is that there is just one ADC,
multiplexed between the left and the right channels, hence the time skew
between them.
73 Alberto I2PHD
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