Stanley, Jitter measurements of moderately high frequency sources can be made directly with relatively cheap used instruments.
Older sampling 'scopes from H-P and TEK appear on *Bay frequently. The H-P 54120 family boxes are down to US$500 to 800 with sampling heads capable of 12.4GHz measurements. These show up about once per month. If you're trying to buy one, wait for a complete system (mainframe+sampling head) which is listed as operational & you have confidence it's actually working. These things are HEAVY & having to return a junker is painful; even if you get your money back. These mainframes have jitter capture & analysis built in. The internal trigger jitter floor is about 1ps, good enough for most measurements. The internal timebase delay feature allows measuring multi- cycle jitter out to many screens width of data. Obviously, long delays will introduce added jitter floor contribution, but it's still quite good. Regards, Pete Rawson _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
