[time-nuts] WWVB BPSK Receiver Project? (fwd)

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Mar 15 22:27:53 UTC 2012


In message <Pine.LNX.4.64.1203152001370.3542 at tesla>, Marek Peca writes:


>Yes, it should work on any USB audio capable OS, ie. Linux, Windows, MacOS etc.

I would like to recommend against this approach for a number of reasons.

First, yes, while you can do undersampling and such, it puts very high
requirements on your analog filters.

The reason I use 1MSPS is that it allows me to use a very sloppy low-pass
filter filter which just cuts off somewhere around 150-200 kHz, and do
everything else in software.

This means that I have no phase/group-delay distortion in the analog
part that I need to compensate in software.

It also means that I don't have to change hardware to play with different
signals, they're all there, all the time, for instance the stuff under
	http://phk.freebsd.dk/Leap/
is pulled out that way.

If I, based on my design, were to design a gadget for doing VLF
time-nuts stuff, it would be:

Floating Input trafo with center-tap for powering antenna
16 bit 1MSPS ADC
ARM chip 
10MHz clock input
1PPS sync input
1PPS sync output
(DAC output for {Rb|Ocxo}DO use ?)
1-4MB RAM
USB2 interface 

Sending 2MB/s through a serial port profile is not a big problem
for USB2 or for that matter for an operating system, so you can
easily grap full spectrum and play with your your PC, and once you
have made some of it work, you can compile the same code and and
download it to the ARM chip, and use the serial port only for
stats/summary/(Tek4010-graphs) or you can use another USB profile
or whatever.

The ARM chip is plenty powerful to do pretty much anything you
are to on its own once you give it the code to do so.

-- 
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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