[time-nuts] Binary Sampler

[Mike Monett]

To All,

For the benefit of those who do not subscribe to the SED newsgroup, here
is a brief description of the binary sampler along with two significant
advantages:

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Conventional samplers  for  home brewers usually go  to  1  GHz. The
SD-32 sampler for the Tektronix 11801C mainframe goes to 50 GHz. The
HP 110GHz oscilloscope costs around $1.3 Million USD, with  a 10-bit
resolution. Very impressive, and very expensive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXYje2B04xE

I have  invented  a new sampling technology  that  promises  160 GHz
bandwidth, yet  is  affordable  to home  experimenters.  If  you can
afford an IPhone or IPad, you can afford this sampler.

This technology is not pie-in-the-sky. I made a basic 5  GHz version
for the  University  of Ludwigshafen, Germany,  and  they  were very
pleased with  the results. This was the first prototype, and  I have
made significant improvements since then.

The  sampler   offers   substantial   advantages   over conventional
samplers:

1. conventional  diode  samplers  can  have  significant  loss using
multiple stages  to acquire the sample, perhaps 40 dB or  more. This
degrades the SNR, especially for low-level signals. The  new sampler
has no  such loss and operates on the input signal  directly, giving
maximum SNR.

2. conventional  samplers  produce samples that  combine  the actual
signal plus  noise.  Averaging can improve the SNR  up  to  a limit,
where it takes too long to improve the SNR. The improvement is given
by sqrt(N),  where  N is the number of  samples.  Improving  the SNR
means doubling  the number of samples, and  eventually  the doubling
takes too  long to be practical. In addition, the  signal  can drift
during long sampling times making the results useless.

The new  sampler  bypasses this limit by restricting  the  amount of
change that can occur in each sample, so the  conventional equations
no longer  apply. It can easily recover signals buried in  30  dB of
noise, which is impossible with conventional samplers.
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I am attaching a paper I wrote in 2003 discussing the theory and
results of the first working binary sampler. I have made
significant improvements since then, which I will discuss later.

I have got the binary sampler technology working in the phase domain
in LTspice. This is a big deal, since it gives the same noise
rejection as in the amplitude domain. This will have significant
advantages in GPS timing recovery.

In particular, to minimize the jitter caused by the sawtooth phase
error due to misalignment of the local oscillator with the satellite
carrier frequency. For example, see one of TVB's many analysis of a
MG1613S GPS Receiver:

http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/MG1613S/ (2010)

Of course, this cannot eliminate the timing error caused by constant
phase difference when the signals are aligned (hanging bridges), but
I hope to be able to recover an error signal to apply to the local
oscillator to keep the phase constant.

More information soon.

Mike
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