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When I started being interested in Precision Timing, I wanted to know the various methods available to verify a given oscillator's stability.
I asked a question on the time-nuts mailing list (Ref 1) and did I get responses!!!
The following is a summary of what I got.
That sounds like a simple question. After all, an oscillator is a simple circuit, it provides a signal at a single frequency and at a stable level.
How stable is the frequency is what this page is about.
Variations in frequency (and in level) can be very short term, short term or long term. Measuring these variations requires different methods, depending on what you are interested in.
The definitions below are not absolute, they are intended as a guideline.
Very short term variations occur within a second or less. They usually manifests themselves as frequency (or phase) modulation (or amplitude modulation) as used by broadcast stations to send music and voice programs, and they are usually measured in the frequency domain using spectrum analyzers or phase noise meters.
Short term variations occur between one second and several minutes to an hour. Usually we consider short term variations to include the effects of temperature variation, but to exclude the effects of aging for instance.
This page focusses on short and long term variations, which are usually measured using a frequency counter or a universal counter, sometimes with other equipment.
Please note that the presence of Amplitude Modulation may affect Frequency Modulation
or more generally Frequency Stability measurements.
Some test methods are more effective than others at eliminating amplitude modulation
effects from frequency stability measurements. This applies to all types of
variations, short and long term.
Frequency Counters, or more generally Universal Counters are instruments designed to measure oscillators, so you will need one of those, with a computer interface port of some sort. In most cases, that will be a GPIB (IEEE-488, or HP-IB) port. I have a page about interfacing GPIB equipment (Ref 2) which I recommend you read if you want to do that.
I am familiar with several types of GPIB equipped Universal Counters, the HP 5316A, the HP 5334B and the HP 5370A. The HP 5370A is relatively expensive on eBay compared to the other two, but either will work. The HP 5328A also has the capability to do Time Interval measurements, and some units have the GPIB option, but I have no personal experience with this model. There are lots of other models.
Assuming that the problem of getting the data from the instrument to the PC is resolved, there are other issues to address before selecting a suitable test procedure.
The test procedure will depend on the stability of the oscillator you are trying to measure.
If the oscillator's stability is worse than that of an average crystal oscillator
(free running VCO for instance), you can probably simply measure the frequency
with the frequency counter and log it to a file. The HP 5328 and HP 5316
have 0.1 Hz resolution (at 10 MHz, with 10 seconds gate time, in overflow mode),
and that should be sufficient for a free running VCO.
The others have 0.001 Hz (HP 5334) and 0.0001 Hz resolution (HP 5370).
Be aware that once the data is in the PC, you can do manipulations that
may increase the resolution of the final measurement (by averaging
a number of readings).
Please note that while all frequency counters use a crystal controlled time base for frequency reference, they are not all created equal and as a minimum should be allowed to warm up and stabilize before making any measurement. Check the specs and if possible have the instrument calibrated before assuming it is "perfect".
So if you are trying to measure the stability (drift) of a free running oscillator, you can probably stop reading here.
In general terms, the only way to know how stable an oscillator is is to compare it to a reference of some sort. Let's put aside the measurement method where the signal is fed through a delay line and mixed with itself. This is used to measure phase noise (which is a type of short term variation), but is not the best method to measure long term drift or uncertainty (because the delay line is temperature sensitive, and it is impractical to make a delay line long enough to measure slow variations such as drift).
Since the measurement is a comparison, you will measure the sum of the variations between the two oscillators and you won't be able to discriminate between the two. So you must have a known good, stable frequency reference to check your signal against. In many cases, that will be the reference built into the counter, or it could be an external reference, such as a GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO) or a Rubidium (or Cesium if you can afford it) oscillator for instance.
If the oscillator you want to check is fairly stable, such as a PLL with a crystal reference, you must make sure your frequency counter has a time base of better stability than the device under test (DUT). All HP counters listed above have a high stability timebase option (either the HP 10544A or the newer HP 10811A, which are both excellent). If you have one of those, you are probably OK. If you have the regular time base, check the specs because if your oscillator under test has stability comparable to the time base in counter, you won't know for sure what you are measuring.
Assuming the oscillator under test is a crystal referenced PLL, and assuming your counter has a time base at least 10 times more stable than the oscillator you are trying to measure, there are several things you may want to measure.
If you simply want to know the long term drift (over several hours), you may be able to use the direct frequency measurement method over a long period of time. Make sure the equipment is at stable temperature, otherwise you will be measuring stability over temperature, which may or may not be what you want to do :-)
For the more curious out there, there is a great tutorial on crystal oscillators by John Vig, that used to be available from the IEEE web site (Ref 6) but as of Dec 06, the link appears dead. I had downloaded a copy which is available on this site (Ref 7).
Here are a couple of charts from the presentation, useful to understand the main mechanisms behind crystal oscillators frequency instabilities:
The left part is the short term noise, essentially white noise, with a typical 1/f power density drop, then the plateau is due to flicker noise and is essentially constant over a range of frequencies (or time periods), then at the right is the aging and random walk chanracteristic.
The short term variations can be better illustrated by this second chart:
If you are more interested in short term stability (the wander of the oscillator around its frequency over seconds or minutes, or maybe a few hours), you probably will have to use a statistical tool called Allan Deviation. Search Google for "Allan Deviation" and you will find lots of links. My FAQ #2 has an interesting exchange with Tom VanBaak explaining Allen Deviation in easily understood terms. Also, Ulrich Bangert has written a nice, free program Plotter (Ref 3) that will plot the data and compute the Allan Deviation from a table of Time Interval measurements.
The Allan Deviation (Ref 9) is a statistical tool that calculates how accurately you can predict the occurrence of the next pulse, transition or event, based on measurements made on previous pulses, transitions or events.
For instance, you may have an oscillator that drifts in a predictable way, and it's Allan Deviation would be good (low), or you may have an oscillator that has little drift on average, but wanders a lot around its nominal frequency (phase noise), and its Allan Deviation would be bad (high). In either case, the Plotter program will allow you to display the data so that you can easily visualize both types of variations.
The Allan Deviation is typically computed from a series of Time Interval (TI) measurements against a reference oscillator. Any one of the counters listed above can do this measurement, which simply is the measure of the delay between a signal on Input A (Start channel) and another signal on Input B (Stop channel).
Please note the Plotter program can work with either frequency data or Time Interval data.
***IMPORTANT***
To use the Time Interval method, the signals (the time base and the
signal from the DUT) do not need to be at the same frequency, but they
must be harmonically related (for instance, one at 1 kHz and one at 1
Hz, or 1 kHz and 500 Hz). If the signals are not at the same frequency,
put the lower frequency signal on the Start channel.
If the oscillators are not phase locked to each other or to a common reference, they will drift relative to one another. So, if you try to do a Time Interval measurement between, for instance, two 10 MHz signals that drift apart, the time interval will increase until it reaches the period of the signal, then recycle to zero and drift again. This is called "cycle wrapping" or "cycle folding". This will confuse the analysis tool. The more apart the signals are, the more difficult it will be to use the data.
So to do TI measurements between drifty oscillators, you are better off dividing down the signals so that it takes longer for the signals to be apart by one full period. How much you need to divide depends on how far apart the frequencies are and for how long you want to collect data. A rough order of magnitude is as follows: assume you compare two 10 MHz signals that are 1 Hz apart, that's 10e-7 difference, so if you divide both signals down to 1 Hz, it will take 10e7 seconds for them to drift apart by one full second, that's 115 days, so in most cases you won't need nearly that much division.
I have used an HP 5334B Universal Counter (Ref 4) connected to a computer via the GPIB port to compare the stability of a 10 MHz crystal oscillator to the 1 PPS (Pulse Per Second) output of a GPS Disciplined Oscillator (see FAQ-2.php page).
I fed the 1 PPS from the GPS to the Start channel of the counter, and I divided down the 10 MHz from the OCXO by 256 (two 4 bit counters 74F161) and fed that signal (39.0625 kHz) to the Stop channel, so that cycle wrap would not occur too often.
The computer program simply takes one measurement of the Time Interval
every few seconds and saves the data to a file that is fed to the Plotter
program. The file format is simply one reading per line, as shown below:
.0000000584
.00000005848
.00000005846
.00000005844
.00000005887
.00000005846
Since the 10 MHz crystal oscillator was not phase locked to the GPS (and it was off by about one Hz), the Time Interval did cycle wrap every few hours. That was not excessive for the Plotter program, which has capability to clean up such artifacts. Typically, you connect the slower oscillator (which preferably should be the reference, but it will work even if it's the DUT) to the Start Channel, and the faster oscillator to the Stop Channel of the counter.
These plots are intended to show the features of the Plotter program.
HP10811-Thunderbolt-1_raw.png
Using Plotter's Step Removal tool, it was easy to remove the cycle wraps:
HP10811-Thunderbolt-2_no_steps.png
HP10811-Thunderbolt-3_remove_drift.png
HP10811-Thunderbolt-5_final.png
Here is another plot taken later, with the HP 10811 fully warmed-up. This plot spans about 4.7 hours (8517 data points taken at 2 seconds spacing).
HP10811-Thunderbolt-6_final.png
To see what HP 10811's can do under optimum conditions (and when compared to state of the art frequency standards), check Tom Van Baak's HP 10811 Stability Comparison page (Ref 5).
In practical terms, the best way to compare an unknown oscillator to a reference oscillator will be to divide down your reference signal and your test signal sufficiently so that cycle wrap does not occur too often. How much division will depend on how stable the DUT is. Use the guidelines above to figure this out.
If the oscillator you are testing is very clean, the clock shaper and dividers must be designed so that they do not contribute appreciably to the noise of the oscillator. The clock shaper is the circuit that converts the sinewave from the oscillator to a digital signal suitable to drive the dividers. There was a very interesting thread about this on the time-nuts mailing list recently, and I have planned to make a web page out of the best parts of that thread, come back on occasion to see if it's up.
For examples of clock shaper circuits, see my related page (Ref 8).
So, there you have it. The HP Universal counters have very interesting capabilities to check the stability of oscillators, but depending on how stable the oscillator under test is, you may have to build some dividers to be able to quantify its stability using the Allan Deviation.