Hi Like any control loop, gain, bandwidth and noise are all related. In a DOCXO you have two control loops and they do interact. That said, there's nothing grossly wrong with the four OCXO's. The noisy parts have a bit more gain in the controller. The quiet parts have a bit less gain. The easy way to see this is the ringing after the current changes.
Without ADEV numbers there's no way to know which one is good (or better) and which one is bad (or worse). The noisy parts may be responding to the ambient temperature rumble (thus correcting for it) and the quiet ones may be ignoring it (allowing it to hit the crystal). It's also possible that the noisy ones have an electrical issue in the loop that generates the noise. If all the ovens started from the same temperature, there is a variance in the oven set points. Some take longer to warm up than others. You don't mention if they started the same, so that may or may not be significant. To further complicate things, in a double oven, you can have a noisy outer oven that gets suppressed by the inner oven. Are your specific 260's double ovens? No way to be sure without tearing one open. The second "step" in the current plot could be an inner oven cutting back. Bob On Feb 18, 2013, at 2:40 PM, Ed Palmer <[email protected]> wrote: > I know that when making AC measurements on various OCXOs of the same type, > you have to expect wide variations in the results. e.g. TVB's Allan > Deviation measurements on a selection of 10811A oscillators at > http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/z3801a-osc . But what about DC current > measurements? How much variability should you expect? > > I recently bought 4 MTI 260 oscillators with thoughts of doing some > 3-cornered hat experiments. I thought I'd use the best 3 of 4. One test I > always do on an OCXO is to measure the DC current drain as it warms up. > Nothing radical - I have an HP 6622A GPIB-equipped linear power supply. I > just do GPIB queries as fast as I can and log the results. I get about 6 > readings per second. More than enough for my needs. > > This time, I was surprised by the results of this test. The attached picture > shows why. I've offset the traces horizontally and vertically for clarity so > I deleted the axes. The horizontal lines are 200 ma apart, but the position > of each trace is arbitrary. All four oscillators start at a current-limited > value of ~1 Amp and have a steady-state current drain of ~230 mA. The length > of the graph is ~20 minutes. > > Although the family resemblance is obvious, I was surprised by the different > noise levels. I let one of the noisy units run for a day to see if it would > settle down, but there was no improvement. Are these results reasonable, or > do I have one oscillator with a good oven (blue trace), one marginal > (purple), and two rather poor ones (red and green)? I'm thinking that the > noise on the oven could affect the Allan Deviation due to either or both of > the thermal inconsistencies or varying load on the power supply. > > Any thoughts? > > Thanks, > Ed > > <image001.png>_______________________________________________ > 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. _______________________________________________ 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.
