[time-nuts] Help understanding an ADEV

[Bob Stewart]

After spending a lot of effort trying to get some useful tuning figures for the PID in my GPSDO engine, I decided to capture the DAC output with my 3456A.  And, of course I've made an ADEV plot.  If I understand this correctly, it means that there is mostly justnoise out to 2 tau, and an area from about 4-5 tau is mostly noise, as well.  Could someone tell me if I have this right?  It matches what I'm seeing on the delta plot, and would explain why we couldn't get anything approaching reasonable stability from the OCXO, since the noise is larger than the increments being made to the DAC.


I've ordered the PWM version of the PIC, and hopefully, since it's the motor control version (as opposed to the audio version) it will have much better noise performance.

The red scatter is the EFC measured at the OCXO in tens of microvolts, and the blue line is the ADEV.  I'm using a short shielded twisted-pair with mini-clipsas the probe.  Hopefully I've got things scaled properly and have run the test properly.


http://evoria.net/AE6RV/TIC/DAC.wander.png

Bob - AE6RV