[time-nuts] How can I generate a very clean 1 W signal @ 116 MHz ?

Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) drkirkby at kirkbymicrowave.co.uk
Mon May 30 11:06:45 UTC 2016


I was thinking about designing a 2 m (144-146 MHz) ->HF (28-30 MHz)
transverter, using a 116 MHz local oscillator feeding a level 30 mixer.

116 + 28 = 144
116 + 30 = 146

I'm wondering what's the best way to generate 116 MHz with very low phase
noise. Phase noise at < 20 kHz offset is particularly important, but 200
kHz would be fairly important. Outside that, it does not matter too much.

The ability to lock to 10 MHz would be "nice", but certainly not essential,
as absolute frequency stability would not be of prime importance. Getting
the phase noise as low as possible would be more important. I expect better
performance can be achieved if one forgets about locking the signal source
to something else, but I may be wrong.

An HP 8663A sig gen has <-147 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset, but I'd hope its
possible to produce something better than is possible in a commercial sig
gen that covers up to 2.5 GHz.

Dave



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