[time-nuts] Making the most of SRS Rb source

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Jan 18 15:42:02 EST 2006


In message <a06230901bff4185af95f@[192.168.0.8]>, David Forbes writes:
>At 6:43 AM -0800 1/18/06, James Maynard wrote:

>I suppose it would make a lot more sense to run the GPS 1PPS into the 
>Rb source so that it will discipline itself, and the phase error be 
>monitored to make sure it stays at zero.
>
>Am I barking up the right tree here?

Sorry if this is a bit longwinded:

You would want to be quite carefull in your choice of timeconstant
on the PRS10, if you set it too short you will ruin your short term
stability and if you set it too long you will get worse performance
than you have today.

I've been playing a lot with the PRS10 and one of the things I found
is that a raw PPS signal from a GPS is badly suited as input for
the PRS10 because of the short term jitter (+/- N nanoseconds for
some N > 20 typically, dependent on your GPS receiver.

The PRS10 can enable a a 256 sample running average on the PPS
input, but that is not nearly long enough to filter out the sampling
artifacts in the GPS/PPS (The ones Tom calls "Hanging Bridges").

In an experiment I slaved an OCXO oscillator to the PPS
from the GPS, and divided that down to 1Hz as input to the PRS10.

That allowed me to use about four times longer timeconstant in the
PRS10 and disable the "256 filter" in the PRS10 and the stability
was better overall.

An even better result was obtained by moving the PLL from the PRS10
onto a computer where the "negative-sawtooth" information from the
GPS could be taken into account.  I fed the GPS/PPS into the PRS10,
used the TT command to read the measured phase as input to the PLL
and the SF command to set the frequency.

The best results where had using my HP5370B for the timestamping.

My conclusion was that even though the timestamping circuitry in
the PRS10 is good, it is not good enough to do the Rb part justice
and leaving the negative sawtooth correction out of the PLL is
ruinous for the Rb parts good performance.

So if I were you, I would use the SR620 to measure between the
GPS and the PRS10 and implement the PLL in a small computer
which talks to both, or alternatively, use the PRS10 for the
timestamping, but have the external computer do the PLL.

Ideally, it should be possible to have a microcontroller read
the GPS data stream, extract the negative sawtooth and send
TO commands to the PRS10, but at least in my firmware version
that is not possible.  SRS told me that they have allowed that
in more recent firmware.

Poul-Henning

PS: If you read the PRS10 docs, it's pretty simple to replicate
their PLL parameters.  Just remember that they had to do it
on a small microcontroller and you'll see how simple it is.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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