Oscillator metrology with software defined radio
Jeff A. Sherman, Robert J\"ordens

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that commercially available software defined radios can perform high-precision time and frequency metrology, surpassing traditional devices in accuracy and enabling novel comparisons across widely different frequencies, including optical clocks.
Contribution
It introduces a method using SDRs for high-precision time and frequency measurements, outperforming purpose-built devices and enabling comparisons at optical frequencies.
Findings
SDRs achieve 20 fs and 1 fs time deviation noise floors at 10 MHz and 6 GHz.
Relative amplitude measurement instability of 3e-7 at 5 MHz.
Femtosecond-level comparisons of ultra-stable lasers across terahertz frequency differences.
Abstract
Analog electrical elements such as mixers, filters, transfer oscillators, isolating buffers, dividers, and even transmission lines contribute technical noise and unwanted environmental coupling in time and frequency measurements. Software defined radio (SDR) techniques replace many of these analog components with digital signal processing (DSP) on rapidly sampled signals. We demonstrate that, generically, commercially available multi-channel SDRs are capable of time and frequency metrology, outperforming purpose-built devices by as much as an order-of-magnitude. For example, for signals at 10 MHz and 6 GHz, we observe SDR time deviation noise floors of about 20 fs and 1 fs, respectively, in under 10 ms of averaging. Examining the other complex signal component, we find a relative amplitude measurement instability of 3e-7 at 5 MHz. We discuss the scalability of a SDR-based system for…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Frequency and Time Standards · Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies · Scientific Measurement and Uncertainty Evaluation
