[time-nuts] Very challenging phase noise measurement, does anyone have an idea??

Hans Rosenberg Hrosenberg at catena.nl
Thu Dec 6 08:10:57 UTC 2012


Hi,

We have an FSUP8 which means it Works up to 8GHz. It's an impressive piece of equipment, but the control interface has some bugs, it regularly crashes so hard you have to turn it off so that is a bit of a bummer. However, it measures quite good. The spectrum analyzer functionality starts at 20Hz, but since it has a pll phase noise measurement system, it's limited at the lower end. I think R&S specify 10Mhz but it will start working at 5MHz with the limitation that you cannot measure at large offsets.

Best regards,

Hans Rosenberg

-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On Behalf Of Azelio Boriani
Sent: woensdag 5 december 2012 22:25
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Very challenging phase noise measurement, does anyone have an idea??

Isn't the FSUP a 110K euros equipment 20Hz-50GHz capable? 125KHz shouldn't be a problem. I had an FSUP for 25 seconds to play with... really impressive but too limited test time to appreciate fully.

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Bob Camp <lists at rtty.us> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Just about any of the high speed CMOS parts should work. A 74AC86 is 
> about the earliest part I would trust. Any of the fast logic families 
> that came after that should do equally well.
>
> Bob
>
> On Dec 5, 2012, at 7:03 AM, Hans Rosenberg <Hrosenberg at catena.nl> wrote:
>
> > Hello Time-nuts,
> >
> > I have to do a phase noise measurement and I'm wondering if anyone 
> > here
> has any ideas on that. We have to measure the phase noise of a 125kHz 
> carrier (5Vp-p signal level). The measurement system should have a 
> noise floor that is -164dBc/Hz at a distance of 1kHz to 8kHz away from 
> the carrier.
> >
> > Our current plan is to use 2 of these sources, have one in free 
> > running
> mode and lock the other one to the first one using an XOR gate and 
> then use the output of the XOR gate as an output signal. However, we 
> are wondering if any of you know a better idea. Maybe there is an 
> off-the-shelf piece of equipment that can do that that we could rent. 
> Or maybe we could increase the frequency to a few megahertz using a 
> pll, which means the signal comes into the measurement range of our 
> FSUP phase-noise analyzer. Problem is, the phase detector would then 
> need to have an insanely low noise-floor (in our idea the XOR also has 
> to have this insanely low noise floor as well off
> course) so does anyone have experience with anything like this? Does 
> anyone know an XOR with these good specs? I don't have a clue what a 
> standard
> 74lvc1g86 would do. Needless to say the supply of this XOR would have 
> to be ridiculously clean, but I do have a solution for that problem.
> >
> > Any help is greatly appreciated!
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Hans Rosenberg
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