[time-nuts] HP10514B Mixer Terminations

Brian Kirby kilodelta4foxmike at gmail.com
Tue Mar 30 10:36:06 UTC 2010


Wavetek/Rockland 5120A Synthesizer.

EWKehren at aol.com wrote:
>    Good morning Brian.
>
>    What do you use as an OFF SET oscillator?
>
>    Thank you
>
>    Bert Kehren  Miami
>
>
>
>    In a message dated 3/29/2010 11:31:15 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>    kilodelta4foxmike at gmail.com writes:
>
>      Your correct - your also keeping me up past my bedtime !- I got to
>      be 90
>      miles from home tomorrow morning by 7:30 AM....
>      It looks like I got the squarest wave at 150 pF.   Lesser
>      capacitance,
>      give a peaked sinewave, like maybe a second harmonic.  Past 200 pF,
>      it
>      starts rounding.  150pf= XC of 53 ohms....
>      This DMTD system, will only go to 100 hertz maximum beat for my
>      design...
>      The scope is set to 100 mV per div, 1ms per division, I
>      intentionally
>      mis-triggered it to show rise and fall times.  100 hz beat signal.
>      ANd
>      Bruce told me how to calculate slew rate, but it has to be beated in
>      my
>      thick tough head.....
>      And Bruce, I'll try some coax tomorrow, if I get back home early
>      enough
>      - my work project may keep me late.  And I plan to only use this
>      system
>      to 100 hertz beat, I was just playing around at 1K.....I like
>      learning.
>      Good night.....Brian....KD4FM
>      Bob Camp wrote:
>      > Hi
>      >
>      > You can get a *much* more squared output from the mixer than the
>      photos you show on the scope. The waveform looks a lit like a
>      triangle wave with the tips chopped off. Normally the fastest edge
>      happens into a capacitive load at RF that's below about  0.5 J ohms
>      for a "50 ohm" mixer.
>      >
>      > Bob
>      >
>      > On Mar 29, 2010, at 10:06 PM, Brian Kirby wrote:
>      >
>      >
>      >> I have been working on a Dual-Mixer Time Difference system.  In
>      the first "design type/experiment", I was using HP10514B mixers and
>      a LT1037 preamp and a OP27 zero crossing amplifier/limiter - all a
>      very basic setup.  I obtained some fair measurements;
>      >>
>      >> Using 10 MHz sources, a 9.9999 MHz offset for a 100 hertz beat,
>      the "floor" of the system looked like this:
>      >> 0.01 second = 1x10-10
>      >> 0.1 second = 1x10-11
>      >> 1 second = 1x10-12
>      >> 10 second = 1x10-13
>      >> 100 second = 1x10-14
>      >> 1000 second = 1x10-15
>      >> 10,000 second = 1x10-16
>      >> this was three days of data
>      >>
>      >> Running it again, with a 10 hertz beat; it looked like this;
>      >> 0.1 second = 4x10-12
>      >> 1 second = 4x10-13
>      >> 10 second = 4x10-14
>      >> 100 second = 4x10-15
>      >> 1000 second = 4x10-16
>      >>
>      >> I also had a lot of good suggestions From Ulrich Bangert, Bob
>      Camp and Bruce Griffins, who I will call my mentors and thank for
>      all the help.
>      >>
>      >> I went back and did some basic experiments this evening.  Looking
>      at mixer terminations.  I have attached two photos - low res.
>      >>
>      >> The first photo named mixer_10db, is the mixer driven with +10
>      dbm on both ports.  The o'scope is looking thru a basic RC filter of
>      1 kilo-ohm resistor in series with the mixer output, and on the
>      output of the resistor is a 0.1 uF capacitor to ground.  This is a
>      mixer that is intentionally over driven to use as a phase detector.
>      The mixer is rated +13 dbm maximum, and about everybody I have
>      talked with (NIST and BIPM) about these mixers ran them at +10 dbm
>      on both LO and RF ports.  As these mixers are hard to find, and they
>      are not made anymore, I would not over-drive them any further.
>      These mixers also have some of the lowest phase noise measurements
>      on record.
>      >>
>      >> The second photo named mixer_330 pF, is the same setup, except I
>      have put a 330 pF capacitor across the mixer output.  By capacitive
>      terminating the mixer, it squares up the output of the mixer - which
>      makes it easier to be converted to a high slew rate signal.
>      >>
>      >> What I found, is you want to run the minimum capacitance value
>      for the highest beat frequency you plan to run.  That way the signal
>      stays "squared up" from the highest to the lowest beat frequency.
>      >>
>      >> I got this value by playing around by looking at the mixer
>      filtered (RC) output at 1 hz, 10 hz, and 100 hz.  When I was using
>      0.1 and 1 uF terminations, The 1 and 10 hertz beat was OK, but the
>      100 hertz beat was still a sine wave.  That may be why the results
>      above shows a difference.
>      >>
>      >> For a test, at 330 pF, I did try it at 1 KHz, it was back to a
>      sine wave.  So 330 pF looks good for trying to get a "squared" wave
>      out of the mixer for 1, 10 and 100 hertz beats.....I tried 36 pF for
>      1 KHz, it did not present enough capacitance to give the "squared"
>      wave at 1, 10 and 100 hertz beat.
>      >>
>      >> We have been running email outside of Time-Nuts group as I am not
>      sure if any of you wanted to see the project I am working on.  I did
>      not want to clutter up the forum......but if there is an interest, I
>      can bring it back.  My next plans are to start over building a new
>      system using a much lower noise op amp, the LT1028.  If the mixer
>      terminations are OK with my mentors, I will use a LT1028 preamp set
>      for about x15 gain and it will dump into the first set of limiter
>      diodes.  And I believe that will call for 1.6 KHz low pass filtering
>      on the first limiter diodes.
>      >>
>      >> Comments ?
>      >>
>      >> Brian - KD4FM
>      >>
>      >>
>      <mixer_330pf.jpg><mixer_10dbm.jpg>__________________________________
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