I own a DG1022Z and have used it for time-nuttery from time to time. It's not the best device for such a thing, unfortunately.
The positive: you can plug a 10mhz reference clock in the back and the DG1022Z will lock to it. The internal oscillator appears to be a garden-variety crystal (mine has an error of roughly 1E-6) and an external oscillator, e.g. Rubidium or GPSDO, will improve the performance significantly. You can also have the DG1022Z *emit* a clock signal, which is not a useful thing to do for a time-nut since the oscillator is not very useful. The negative: the frequency synthesizer is not up to the standards you might expect as a time-nut. When trying to test a new time interval counter of my own design, I plugged an RbXO into the DG1022Z and simply asked the DG1022Z to divide it down to a 1pps signal. That is, I configured it to create a pulse with a small duty cycle and 1hz frequency using the external clock as a reference. To my surprise, it introduces a small but measurable error of one part in 1E11 in the dividing-down. You can read the full story of this in my post from earlier this year: https://febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts_lists.febo.com/2021-April/103329.html. I ended up instead buying a TADD-2 ( https://tapr.org/product/tadd-2-pulse-per-second-divider/) and this worked perfectly. Regards, -Jeremy On Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 1:13 PM folkert <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > A few days ago I bought a Rigol DG1022Z function generator. > Works really well from what I can see. Especially compared to my > previous solution (a sound-card in my laptop with a few resistors and a > capacitor to adjust the signal level) :-) > Now I noticed that on the back there are a few bnc connectors. One of > them is for a 10MHz external clock. > My question now is: would it make sense to connect a reference clock to > it of some sort? I probably won't *need* it strictly spoken for my > current experiments (verify the frequency response of audio circuits) > but I like to get the maximum out of my gear :-) > > > regards > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] -- To unsubscribe send > an email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] -- To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to and follow the instructions there.
