[time-nuts] GPSDO control loops and correcting quantizationerror

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Sun Sep 16 21:21:57 UTC 2012


On 09/16/2012 10:30 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message<34D5C3CE-6B3D-4944-996A-7637373B2857 at gmail.com>, Dennis Ferguson wr
> ites:
>
>> I'm not sure there could be a difference between the goals of
>> frequency accuracy and time accuracy that would effect that time
>> constant.
>
> It does.
>
> A PLL more or less corresponds to an "PI" regulation, where a FLL
> only needs to have the "I" term.
>
> Because you don't have the interaction between the P and I terms,
> the I-timeconstant can be longer.
>

The balance between P and I is important to establish the damping of 
your PI regulator.

A good PI-based PLL actually combines the FLL and PLL domains by 
differentiating the phase detector and feeding that through a scaling 
into the integrator, adding to the phase-detector scaled by the I 
factor. That way you can get very good pull-in properties which then 
gently goes over to PLL properties. When PLL lock is achieved the FLL 
scale-factor can be removed, as it only contributes noise.

A strict FLL would have the differentiated phase scaled and added into 
the frequency steering, after the PI-regulators integrator. This D term 
would set the frequency right, but the integrator would not learn the
frequency as quick and there would be tracking errors until it learns.

This differentiated phase aided integrator solves the bad pull-in 
behaviour for the case when the reference signal and the oscillators 
signal is far apart.

Cheers,
Magnus



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