Measurement Examples

Measuring performance of some clocks

Below the measurement of the tinyPFA noise floor and 3 clocks in 3 pairs. The very short sample interval was chosen to clearly show the impact of the noise floor on ADEV measurements. Normally a 0.1 s sample interval would have been better for this type of measurement and this would have reduced the noise floor with a factor 5. The ADEV at Tau = 0.1 s shows the Rb is the least stable for short time span ( < 1 s )

Comparing with HP5370A

Below Tau is 10 s the noise floor of the HP prevents to see the real performance of the two OCXO. The tinyPFA is able to track the real performance down to Tau is 0.5 s. Below that the noise floor of the tinyPFA hides the performance of the OCXO

Comparing with home build DMTD

Here a home build DMTD is use for comparison and the noise floor (blue trace) of the tinyPFA (indicated with tinyDMTD) is shown.

Diagnosing phase problems

The high accuracy phase measurements from the tinyPFA can help to diagnose very small phase disturbances. Here the interference between two clocks is shown

Impact of side channel

Using the side channel the temperature induced phase errors are mostly removed and the noise floor continues with slope 1/Tau down to below 1E-16