[time-nuts] Best phase detector / mixer for 100MHz?

Anders Time anderstime at gmail.com
Fri Nov 23 15:42:16 UTC 2012


I have been using an minicircuits mixer as a phase detector for measuring
low frequency(5-10MHz) and it is usually good enough. But when I want to
measure 100MHz the sensitivity of the mixer decreases a lot, so when I want
to measure some really low noise 100MHz(Pascall -178dBc floor with 18dBm
out) oscillators the sensitivity is not good enough. I read in an old
article by Walls, Stein et al(Design considerations in state-of-the-art
signal processing and phase noise measurement system) that one can use two
diodes in series in the double balanced mixer to increase the sensitivity.
I tried this with some standard 1n5711 Schottky and the sensitivity is now
1V/rad, but is there a easier way to do this? /Anders


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