Hi

I have a 53230, but have not gotten around to looking at it’s PLL cleanup 
process.

Bob

On Feb 17, 2014, at 2:38 PM, Tom Van Baak (lab) <[email protected]> wrote:

> Bob,
> 
> I'm wondering if you (or any else) has measured the PLL performance of the 
> 53230-series?
> 
> I agree it will "clean up the crud" but this assumes the ext ref is dirtier 
> than the internal osc.
> 
> What I found instead was that if you use a good external ref the PLL actually 
> makes it worse. This was very disappointing. The XO version of the counter 
> performed worse than the OCXO version even with a maser as the ext reference. 
> Did your reading of the schematic show a way to directly use the ext ref, 
> bypassing the noisy PLL?
> 
> The other thing I found was that the ref out signal was a very polluted copy 
> of the ref in.
> 
> /tvb (i5s)
> 
>> On Feb 17, 2014, at 7:04 AM, Bob Camp <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi
>> 
>> If you dig into the schematics (when they supplied them … ):
>> 
>> The external reference goes into a phase detector. It’s one of those digital 
>> ones that can lock up to many inputs. You could feed 3.33333333 MHz in as a 
>> standard input as well as 0.5, 1, 2.5, 5, and 10 MHz. The internal 
>> oscillator (or an internal oscillator) is phase locked to the external input 
>> through a fairly narrow analog loop. The idea is to clean up the crud on the 
>> standard line. 
>> 
>> With no external reference, the PLL drops out and you go back to what ever 
>> the local reference is. 
>> 
>> Yes there’s a little more to it than that and no the circuit is not exactly 
>> the same on every counter HP ever made. 
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
>>> On Feb 17, 2014, at 7:55 AM, wb6bnq <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Mike,
>>> 
>>> The most likely answer is when you select external time base for an input, 
>>> it disables the connection for the internal oscillator.  The external input 
>>> signal is probably also routed straight to the reference output jack.
>>> 
>>> However, it would be good to read the manual, as they usually cover how 
>>> those connections work.  Otherwise, perhaps someone that owns one could 
>>> provide further insight.
>>> 
>>> Bill....WB6BNQ
>>> 
>>> mike cook wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Something that must be simple to explain, but that I can't get my head 
>>>> round.
>>>> 
>>>> I got a new 53230A.
>>>> When first using it, I measured my T-Bolt 10MHz using the internal 10MHz 
>>>> timebase and it came up short of 10MHz, 9.999 998 5xx. I wasn't worried 
>>>> about it as the counter only has a TCXO internal oscillator. So I fired up 
>>>> my PRS10 and after leaving that on for some time, connected it to  Ext 
>>>> Ref. , changed to the ext time base and measured again. This time 
>>>> 10.000.000.00x. Then I switched the two references, measuring the PRS10 
>>>> against the T-Bolt. Again I got 10MHz down to the 11th digit.
>>>> All that looked good so I have been using it with either the PRS10 locked 
>>>> to GPS, or the T-Bolt as the external time base.
>>>> 
>>>> After leaving it on (but not inactive) for a month, I did an Autocal. No 
>>>> problem.
>>>> I was wondering if that would have changed the internal time base 
>>>> frequency, but no, using that still gave similar figures to the above.
>>>> 
>>>> So at that point I decided to measure the Internal TB against my 
>>>> reference. So I connected the Int. Ref. Out to channel 1, connected my 
>>>> PRS10 ref to Ext. Ref In, selected the EXT time base and found that the 
>>>> count was 10MHz dead on?????  I don't get that at all.
>>>> 
>>>> in summary:
>>>> DUT against internal TB counts < 10MHz.    To me that means that the 
>>>> internal timebase is a bit fast. Is that assumption correct?
>>>> DUT against Ext.Ref counts 10MHz
>>>> Internal TB against Ext.Ref counts 10MHz.       If my assumption above is 
>>>> correct, the count should be greater than 10MHz, no?
>>>> 
>>>> Can anyone shed any light on that?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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