[time-nuts] GPSDO - probably a stupid question.

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Thu Aug 18 02:03:29 EDT 2016


I use the frequency relationship ratio as an indication of how difficult 
the design is. Divide the oscillator frequency with the comparator 
frequency, and the number gives you a ratio, how many output cycles it 
goes between each comparison. Things like smoothing becomes harder when 
this number becomes large. Lock-in etc. also becomes harder.

1-100 is relatively trivial.
1000 is a little challenging and start to need care.

By increasing the comparator frequency, I made designs more trivial and 
that has helped a lot to get the job done without too much hassle.

I bring this up since there is more to the design than just the PLL 
bandwidth and damping factor.

Cheers,
Magnus

On 08/18/2016 03:17 AM, Didier Juges wrote:
> Good point, and an example of how good digital filtering (helped with upsampling) can make the design of the analog filter much easier :)
>
> Reference the digital audio battles of the past century when 1 bit D/As running very fast started replacing the expensive 16 bit audio DACs running at 44kHz.
>
> Didier
>
> On August 17, 2016 5:25:39 PM CDT, Magnus Danielson <magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I agree.
>>
>> There is however a subtle detail, how they leak out over time.
>>
>> At one time we had to lock an 155,52 MHz oscillator up to 8 kHz, this
>> for a 2,48832 Gb/s link, which needs to pass the SDH STM-16 jitter and
>> wander specifications. The first attempt at that PLL was using a 4046,
>> and the charge-pump was being used. The charge-pump has dead-time, and
>> well, they thought it was good to only push the EFC here and there.
>> What
>> this meant was that they created a triangle-waved frequency modulation
>> of low rate, which then created phase modulations as it went through
>> the
>> integration of the oscillator. The scale-up factor made this quite
>> noticeable at the actual bit-rate. It made the point that you need to
>> update often to keep deviations limited, and when doing it at a higher
>> frequency, they are easier to filter out.
>>
>> In essence, you need to think what each comparison or update creates as
>>
>> a step response and how it is averaged out over time.
>>
>> In this regard a PWM is a really bad signal, as it can push the
>> strongest amplitude at the lowest frequency, which becomes hardest to
>> filter. For one design I needed to increase the resolution, so I made
>> an
>> interpolation but with inversed spectral density to that of PWM, to
>> push
>> the highest amplitude to the highest frequency so that filtering
>> becomes
>> easier. Turned out to be quite easy and work well.
>>
>> High update rates can be very useful even if the bandwidth of the loop
>> is low. The bandwidth only limits how low the updaterate can be, but
>> the
>> phase-noise purity makes update rates and smoothing mechanisms
>> interesting.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Magnus
>>
>> On 08/17/2016 11:53 PM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> You can update the EFC a billion times a second.  Update rate and
>> bandwidth are not the same thing. If you want good ADEV, the loop
>> better not have a bandwidth greater than 0.01 Hz. GPS ADEV is pretty
>> awful at 1 and 10 seconds. It is starts to be good past a few thousand
>> seconds. Yes, older modules are a bit worse than newer ones. Also
>> sawtooth correction can make things a bit better.
>>>
>>> Bob
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>>> On Aug 17, 2016, at 2:51 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts
>> <time-nuts at febo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Updating the EFC more quickly reduces the ADEV, though. I find that
>> the fiddly part of tuning a GPSDO design is balancing the ADEV against
>> phase control. If you want keep an iron fist on the phase, you can only
>> do so by constantly swatting around the frequency.
>>>>
>>>> I won't say that getting more frequent phase feedback is a bad
>> thing, but if you're trying to get the PLL time constant to be longer
>> rather than shorter that it won't help a lot.
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>>> On Aug 17, 2016, at 9:57 AM, Peter Reilley
>> <preilley_454 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> You can get crystal oscillators that have a frequency control
>> signal and are more
>>>>> stable than the run of the mill oscillators.   Changing the GPS
>> oscillator would
>>>>> require modifying a very tightly populated circuit board.   Perhaps
>> not possible.
>>>>>
>>>>> What about some of the SDR (software defined radio) projects that
>> aim to
>>>>> implement GPS functionality?   If you used the GPS chipping rate
>> (1.023 MHz)
>>>>> to dicipline the 10 MHz oscillator then you are less sensitive to
>> crystal instabilities.
>>>>> You are updating the crystal one million times a second rather than
>> once per second.
>>>>> This is assuming that the chipping rate of the transmitter is just
>> as good as the
>>>>> 1 PPS signal.   This info from here;
>>>>> https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1753
>>>>> and here;
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals
>>>>>
>>>>> Even using the 50 bits/sec data rate of the GPS signal would allow
>> updating the
>>>>> GPSDO faster than the 1 PPS signal.
>>>>>
>>>>> Pete.
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