RadioBanter - Looking for a GPS disciplined frequency synthesizer

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March 2nd 06 05:51 AM

Looking for a GPS disciplined frequency synthesizer

I am looking for a freqency synthesizer in the band 100Mhz-1Ghz very
stable to test quipments over a long period.

I heard that now there are some who are GPS disciplined?
How does it work ?
Which is one do you recommend ?

Phil.

Dick	March 2nd 06 01:36 PM

Looking for a GPS disciplined frequency synthesizer

On 1 Mar 2006 21:51:12 -0800, wrote:

I am looking for a freqency synthesizer in the band 100Mhz-1Ghz very
stable to test quipments over a long period.

I heard that now there are some who are GPS disciplined?
How does it work ?
Which is one do you recommend ?

Phil.

I would look for a standard synthesizer with a separate input for the
time base like many frequency counters have. Then buy a used GPS time
standard receiver with a 10 mhz output to drive the synthesizer.
Would probably be a lot less money than a current, state-of-the-art
synthesizer with it built-in. The HP Z3801A GPS time standard
receiver can be obtained on Ebay for around $300.

Dick

Tim Shoppa

March 2nd 06 01:37 PM

Looking for a GPS disciplined frequency synthesizer

wrote:
I am looking for a freqency synthesizer in the band 100Mhz-1Ghz very
stable to test quipments over a long period.

I heard that now there are some who are GPS disciplined?
How does it work ?
Which is one do you recommend ?

Before you get too far into spending money, you have to decide what
stability and sidebands/phase noise you can deal with. Also, if you
need traceability you have to start with that in your spec.

You can easily sink $500K into a fancy new synthesizer and end up with
something that's not good enough for a lot of truly stringent
applications.

Alternatively a surplus Z3801A (a few hundred $) + a surplus HP synth
(a few hundred $ more) chained to the Z3801A's 10MHz out might do what
you need.

The GPS lock gets you to the part per billion in precision. If the few
PPM level is good enough you might not need GPS, the OCXO or TCXO that
are typically built into the synths of the 80's and 90's may be good
enough with a little calibration check-up.

Tim.

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