[time-nuts] Austron 2010B (disciplined OCXO) square wave conversion

[Bob Camp]

Hi


> On Aug 6, 2016, at 3:00 AM, Ruslan Nabioullin <rnabioullin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi, I recently bought an Austron 2010B, a disciplined OCXO standard with adjustable disciplining parameters, for use as a clean-up oscillator and a decent fallback to my Ball MRT-H, a rubidium standard.  I figured that the quartz standard's 1 Mhz and 5 MHz outputs are fine---the former is exactly what my Truetime 814-149, a time code generator, needs for eventually providing PPS output to my SPARC-based NTP server, and the latter can be doubled, amplified, and distributed, all with a single distribution amplifier unit, for use as a timebase for transmitters and lab instruments.  Only later did I realize that for some bizarre reason, all of the outputs are square wave, not sinusoidal!  Great.
> 
> Any ideas on the likely reason that the unit was engineered with only square wave outputs?

Obviously some system somewhere needed a bunch of square waves. Likely some sort of digital system. 
Telecom gear comes to mind. Austron would happily sell you one with just about any sort of outputs you
wished to pay for.

>  Obviously this will render division to PPS trivial, but all of the applicable equipment that I've encountered use a sinusoidal reference, not a square one, so it doesn't seem prudent to exclude sine.  And naturally, what is the most prudent course of action in this situation?  I'd rather use something prebuilt than building my own converter, but all the distribution amplifiers I've looked at lack such a conversion feature, and I'm unsure whether plain square to sine converters are suitable for such time/frequency metrology applications.

Provided the phase noise is ok, a square wave works fine. The bigger question is: Do the square wave outputs drive 50 ohms ok? 

Bob

> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Ruslan
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