Nick,
To get you started, I would use a free-running Rubidium and a
time-interval counter. The rubidium will be having the wrong frequency,
but that should cancel out in the Allan deviation processing. The drift
of the rubidium clock will form a limit, but you can overcome that by
using either Hadamard deviation or do drift-removal. Collect your data
with TimeLab and you have a good starting-point. The time interval
counter should at least have 1 ns single-shot resolution, the more the
merrier. Try grab a SR620 or HP5370 or something.
The setup I propose is not optimum, but should give you some interesting
result and hopefully in the right direction.
If you can, recording the GPSDOs state such as time-error, EFC and other
key parameters in parallel can be very helpful in analysis, so make sure
it pops that out so you can have a time-stamped file with it.
The rubidum trace will be the external "judge" of what movements it
really did except for long-term where the rubidiums systematics starts
to cave in.
There comes that point when a GPSDO vendor needs to turn on their
Cesium, but I think you have some issues and things to learn before you
need to do that. Had to support one GPSDO vendor over my mobile phone at
one time as to how to bring up the cesium, so much fun. They reached
that point for the right reason. :)
Cheers,
Magnus
On 08/16/2015 08:47 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts wrote:
I’ve designed and make and sell a GPSDO on Tindie
(https://hackaday.io/project/6872-gps-disciplined-tcxo). It’s brand new - I’ve
sold a handful of them so far. So as to make this post not *entirely*
self-serving, what I would like is some further guidance on how I can better
characterize its performance.
The GPS reference is a 1 pps signal (It’s the Adafruit Ultimate GPS module - a
PA6H). The manufacturer claims an accuracy of ±10 ns, but that's accuracy
relative to the true start of the GPS second. They don’t make any claim for
stability.
The oscillator itself (Connor Winfield DOT050V 10 MHz) has a short-term (though
they don’t say how short that term is) stability of 1 ppb. The absolute
accuracy of it is (I assume) irrelevant, because it’s a VCTCXO and the control
voltage is steered by GPS feedback.
The feedback loop takes samples over a 100 second period. That gives me an
error sample with a granularity of 1 ppb. I keep a rolling sample window of 10
samples to get an error count over 1000 seconds. I've kept track of both of
these values for extended periods (days) as well as logging the DAC value (the
number that's proportional to the control voltage). The 1000 second sample
window error averages zero, and it almost never exceeds ±7 (every once in a
while if I physically move it, it will show a momentary error glitch, but that
shows up in the short term feedback sampling too). The 100 second samples are
almost all 0 or ±1, with an occasional ±2 showing up. As I said before, if I
bonk the oscillator, it may briefly show a ±6 or so for one sample.
If I pit two of them against each other on a scope and take a time lapse video
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HkeCI90i44), you can see that they stay mostly
locked with occasional periods of drift. I sort of assume that that represents
periods where the two GPS receivers disagree as they decide differently how to
select among the available satellites.
I've been saying out loud that the oscillator is ±1 ppb from GPS over the 1000
second window. I know of Allan variance, but I don't have anything else handy I
can use for comparison. I also can't really afford to send one off for testing
to a proper lab. In looking at http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2297.pdf, it
suggests that my results are relatively poor compared to what a GPSDO can
achieve (more like 10^-12 rather than 10^-9), but I assume that they’re able to
use a higher frequency GPS reference than just 1 PPS (and they’re a lot
pricier).
What else can I do to try and characterize the performance? If mine is
performing far more poorly than the same price ($175) can buy elsewhere, then
what am I doing wrong?
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