If your concern is to clean up the harmonics, a crystal ladder filter is probably not the best choice, a low pass filter would be easier to design, would probably require no adjustment and be cheaper in parts with less effect on the fundamental signal you are interested in.
If your concern is cleanliness and close-in phase noise (as Mike referred to), then a narrow crystal filter would indeed be a better choice. Keep in mind that ladder filters have an assymetric frequency response. That may or may not help you. On the other end, if you are going to drive any kind of digital circuitry, a square wave (even distorted) is probably better than a sine wave. Didier ------------------------ Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless thingy while I do other things... -----Original Message----- From: "Leigh L. Klotz, Jr WA5ZNU" <le...@wa5znu.org> Sender: time-nuts-boun...@febo.com Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:54:01 To: time nuts<time-nuts@febo.com> Reply-To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts@febo.com> Subject: [time-nuts] FRS-C TTL / sine outboard filter question At the local flea market, I picked up what appears to be an Efratom FRS-C. It is marked "TTL" internally. It has the passive connector board, but not the active board with the 15 MHz synthesizer on it. Mine is marked "TTL" internally. The service manual has a chart showing the differences between the sine and TTL options, and I converted it to the sine version by changing a jumper to a resistor and populating an LC filter with 10uH and 100pF (~5 MHz). I also terminated the RF connection on the connector board with a 47 ohm resistor to ground. The output now doesn't have the tremendous overshoot it used to have, but it's also not very sinusoidal. That's not surprising given the simplicity of the on-board filter. Instead of a multi-stage LC filter, I wondered about a crystal ladder filter: since the output frequency is fixed, the high Q and low cost of the crystal filter might be an advantage, but I wasn't sure about how effective xtal ladder filters are at suppressing harmonics, as each individual crystals would have odd overtone responses, so it might not be a good plan. Does anyone have practical experience with a filter topology for cleaning up the output of the FRS-C at 10 MHz? Leigh. P.S. Just so that I can be topical, note that the FRS-C has a C-field adjustment 0-5V input, so I could use it as the reference oscillator for a TPLL. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.