[time-nuts] Faster/more automated Rb oscillator calibration

[Bob Camp]

Hi

For even more fun, hook the 5335 up with a GPIB card and feed it into TimeLab or one of the other free programs. It will unwrap the phase and compute the ADEV while you watch.

Bob

On May 31, 2013, at 8:24 AM, Brian Alsop <alsopb at nc.rr.com> wrote:

> This is probably nothing new, but looking over the archives, I didn't see it posted in the last couple years
> 
> I've had an LPRO-101 Rb oscillator for several years.
> It was first calibrated using the phase shift vs time method using a GPSDO as the reference.  Stopwatch and oscilloscope.  Ugh!
> 
> Needless to say it got really time consuming with full cycle times of 1000's of seconds.
> 
> I've revisited this and come up with something much simpler but more importantly automated.
> 
> Simply input the GPSDO oscillator signal into channel A and the Rb oscillator into channel B of my HP 5335A counter.  Tell it to determine the time difference (1ns resolution).  Send these differences to a file via HPIB.
> 
> The neat thing is that one can quickly see trends over a fraction of a cycle.  When done, let it run all night and look at the output.
> 
> The output is a sawtooth or reverse sawtooth ranging from 0 to 100 ns. One can compute the time difference between any points of adjacent teeth to determine a full cycle's phase shift.  Alternately one can look at part of a sawtooth for a quick estimate.
> 
> It's neat to see that I'm starting to get triangles rather than a sawtooth-- meaning the two are essentially at the same frequency and drifting about each other.
> 
> BTW the Rb oscillator bias of 1 mHz present two years ago was still there and had changed only 0.2 mHz over the intervening time.
> 
> Regards,
> Brian
> 
> 
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