[time-nuts] Yet Another GPSDO design - Timing on the move

Jan-Derk Bakker jdbakker at gmail.com
Mon Jun 19 18:44:35 EDT 2017


Dear all,

After a hiatus of seven years I have finished the first version of my GPSDO
design. The full schematic can be found at https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B7mNymXfcKMqaFcyRXdURC1KMXM/view?usp=sharing (Google Drive seems to guess
the file type wrong; Acrobat opens the file just fine). Its first use will
be in the telemetry system of my students' solar-powered boat (
http://cleanmobility.info/voertuigen/solar-2015/ ), on a trip from
Amsterdam to Monaco.

The design objectives are, in decreasing order of importance:

1) Providing a reference frequency for a SDR system in the 868MHz ISM band,
having a frequency drift over a day no worse than 10% of the maximum
Doppler shift at a relative speed of 100km/h, while consuming at most 2W in
steady-state from a 24V net

2) Testing/teaching platform for the evaluation of different design choices
in a GPSDO, including alternative phase detectors, EFC generation by DAC vs
PWM, FLL/PLL algorithms, timing vs navigation receivers, and OCXO choices

3) When equipped with a timing receiver, having ADEV/MDEV at most 10x worse
than a Thunderbolt in the interval between 1s and 1d.

(Yes, objective 1 could be met with a quality OCXO, but where's the fun in
that?)

Where possible I tried to stick to the suggested design criteria listed in
https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2007-April/025597.html .

The primary phase detector is a TDC7200, which almost feels like cheating
after all the trouble I went through last time (
https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2010-August/049347.html ). The
'7200 is used in Mode I, which needs at least 12ns between START and STOP.
A fairly vanilla synchronizer handles this. As I expect the phase offset in
lock to be zero (modulo hanging bridges), the first flip-flop is clocked
with an inverted copy of the main clock to further reduce the possibility
for metastability. U16/U17 latch the lower bits of clock divider U19/U18 to
get around synchronizer uncertainty in the microcontroller. A second
TDC7200 channel is added to ease comparison with other references or
timestamp external events. (I have a mains ZCD in the works just for this).
Both channels have a simple flip-flop as an alternate phase detector; the
second channel can be wired to be driven by the GPS PPS as well.

The microcontroller board holds a 32MHz ATXMega256A3U. While this board
cannot use the 10MHz oscillator for its main clock, both 10MHz and PPS
inputs are available as event channels. The microcontroller board also has
a microSD socket for standalone phase data logging and a charger for a
small LiIon cell that can provide power when the boat's systems are powered
down. U21 is a 128KB SRAM chip for scratch space, U13 is a FeRAM chip to
store EFC settings (as EEPROM would wear out too fast with regular writes,
and I cannot guarantee having enough energy after detecting a brownout to
only write to EEPROM in such conditions). The other systems for the boat
already include a GPS module (Venus 6) which is used for PPS in normal
circumstances; a footprint for a small Venus8-board offers an alternative
in standalone use ( until I can get my hands on a 3v3 timing receiver ).
The microcontroller measures system temperature, OCXO current and the
voltages on the raw power nets.

The EFC is based on a pair of 16-bit DACs plus a 24-bit ADC in a PID loop,
inspired by Linear/Jim Williams' AN86 ( http://www.linear.com/docs/4177 ).
The DACs are fairly noisy, an RC with a few film caps plus a quiet follower
should take care of that. Plan B for the EFC is a pair of PWM outputs from
the microcontroller followed by a 4-pole filter. Both 1in2 OCXOs with and
without internal reference can be used, as well as cheaper Connor-Winfield
DOC/DOT-series XOs.

What else? Status LEDs, a heavily filtered synchronized switch-mode supply
(necessary to hit the power consumption target), an isolated serial debug
line.

Things I have yet to figure out:
- how to apply the temperature measurements to the EFC. I guess I can
measure the holdover performance of the GPSDO in a climate chamber, but
does such a temperature curve stay mostly-constant over the life of the
OCXO?
- similar to the previous point: how to apply the current measurements to
the EFC. Is there any way to measure/estimate the resistance in the shared
path between heater GND and EFC GND? (I've done my best to directly refer
the filter and the ADC to the GND pin of the oscillator to reduce this
effect on the external path).
- how to properly do outlier removal in a mobile platform which may get
bumped (leading to OCXO jumps). My starting point looks like
https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2006-December/022689.html , but
I'm not sure how to make this robust enough without throwing too much
useable data away. Possibly monitoring (changes in) the satellites the
GPSDO uses for its solution might help
- in relation to the previous point: when to switch between FLL
(aquisition) and PLL (tracking), and when to switch PLL time constants.
(Maybe I should have added an accelerometer to detect jolts)
- how to measure ADEV/MDEV beyond hooking my Thunderbolt and/or my FE-5680
to the auxillary input
(- plus all unknown unknowns)

We're building ten of these to start with. (With a good OCXO, the BOM cost
is a bit over the eBay price of a Thunderbolt). Some stay in Amsterdam over
the summer to collect phase data; for those coming to Monaco I'm still
undecided whether I'll try a simple version of my FLL/PLL or to just use
this trip for logging.

Thoughts?

JDB.


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