[time-nuts] ADEV measurement question
Matthias Jelen
Matthias.Jelen at gmx.de
Wed Aug 19 16:40:15 UTC 2015
Hello,
I´ve got a question concerning ADEV-measurements.
I´m measuring the 15 MHz output of a KS-24361 with my SR-620
with it´s internal (Wenzel) OCXO using Timelab. For the
first shot I used the counters frequency mode with 1s
gatetime. ADEV at tau=1s turned out to be arounf 2E-11,
which fits the 20 ps single shot resolution of the SR-620
nicely.
To overcome this limitation without setting up a DMTD
system, I used the counter as TIC, feeding 1 kHz (derived
from the counter´s reference) to the start channel, the 15
MHz to the stop channel and put the counter into average
mode / 1k samples. This gives me one averaged result per second.
The idea was that this shouldn´t change the measurement
itself, because like in frequency mode with 1s gate time I
get the averaged value over one second, but I expected
trigger noise etc. to be averaged out to a certain amount. I
have to watch out for phase wraps, but as the two frequencys
are quite equal, this is not a big issue here.
As expected, ADEV at tau=1s got much better, it is now in
the 4E-12 area, which sound reasonable.
What makes me wonder is the fact that result are
significantly better now at longer taus (10..100s) also,
despite of the fact that also in frequency mode these result
were well aboce the noise floor (2E-12 @ 10s and so on...).
So, is it a good idea to use this kind of averaging, or am I
overlooking something which turns the numbers better than
they really are? I´m pretty sure I am not the first one to
try this...
I´m looking forward to your comments.
Best regards,
Matthias
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