Hi Jim,
If you have a mother-ship and presuming that it is going to be within
"RF" range of all little ones, how about sending a "PILOT" tone that
comes from the mother-ship to phase lock all the little ones internal
oscillators ???
If there is a master oscillator of any note (i.e., say a Rb unit) in the
mother-ship, then a reasonably decent XO circuit may suffice or a TCXO.
As for ranging with the signal using phase locking, well I would have to
think about that for a bit.
This process was used back in the 1970's to lock the master frequency
source of a few repeaters together so that they could simultaneously
transmit on the same frequency with little to no interference. In this
case, if I recall correctly, a 1000 Hz pilot tone was used as the sync
signal.
In your case you could, perhaps, transmit on some frequency that is out
of the way and use whatever pilot tone you wish. Depending upon the
transmitter bandwidth maybe even transmit a 10 MHz sideband and do
direct comparison to the local (TC)XO. Many possibilities !!!
Bill....WB6BNQ
jimlux wrote:
On 3/13/19 9:17 AM, Attila Kinali wrote:
Hoi Jim,
On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 08:39:24 -0700
jimlux <[email protected]> wrote:
For instance, if I'm buying 10MHz oscillators with a spec of 5ppm,
they'll all fall in a band +/- 50 Hz. But how many are within 1 Hz?
within 0.1Hz?
I have never measured TCXOs, but I've seen data of other devices
that are adjusted at the manufacturer. What you end up with is
something between a uniform distribution and truncated Gauss.
It is also very likely that most are withing 1ppm or even less,
depending on how much margin the manufacturer put into the spec.
Aging and environment will spread the values in a Gauss like fashion
(think of a (anomalous) diffusion process).
Would it be rude to ask for more details on what you are planing to do?
It sounds interesting.
I'm looking at various radio issues with large swarms of tiny
spacecraft - specifically for making a radio telescope. Unlike
terrestrial interferometers where you have reference distribution
(local) or cesium clocks and masers (VLBI), we have to have some other
way to solve the problem.
Fortunately, you can do a lot of post processing, so it's more a
matter of "knowledge" not "control" of the local frequency source on
the swarm nodes.
One scheme to propagate references is to radiate your reference
oscillator so that all the other nodes can receive it, and each node
can then say "I'm node A, and relative to me, nodes B is 1% high, Node
C is 0.5% low, etc." and from that you can (maybe) solve for the
ensemble. One can also get some information about the relative
positions of nodes (by looking at the phase of the signal).
(one does need at least one single "good" reference to tie them all
to.. in the case of most swarm schemes, there's a mother ship to relay
data back to Earth that can provide a broadcast reference, or if
you're close enough to Earth, you can radiate a high quality signal
from Earth).
This whole scheme breaks horribly if too many signals are too close
together, and I suspect that this is the actual case. So we need to
have a way to explicitly move the signals around.
when you're building 1000 nodes, you would really like them to be
a) all the same parts list and construction
b) not require any customization
c) and have the minimum number of parts on the parts list.
(recognizing that I can probably do something like modulate the
reference broadcast with a single bit from some existing part and do
CDMA in some form - but it was a thought..)
--
It's funny - folks have spent a lot of time over the years making
oscillators that are "on frequency" - but with modern processing
techniques, a lot of times it's more about "good phase noise close in"
and "a way to measure and estimate the frequency" (the latter requires
decent ADEV if you're not making the measurement simultaneously) but
no real aging requirement. (Which is good in space applications,
because radiation causes frequency shifts.)
Take the NTIA 20Hz carrier frequency control requirement for SSB voice
radios in HF (to provide natural sounding voice without needing a
clarifier control). At 30MHz, that's <1ppm, and tough with a cheap
crystal. But if you have an integrated GPS receiver with 1pps, you
measure the current crystal frequency and adjust the DDS or PLL as
needed to compensate.
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