Thread: Franklin VFO ?
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Old 16th May 2019, 12:31 am   #32
G0HZU_JMR
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Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK.
Posts: 3,077
Default Re: Franklin VFO ?

Glad the info is useful!

I've spent some time playing with it inside my screened enclosure and I am seriously impressed with the results. The general phase noise performance is fairly predictable and is down to a few basic equations so no surprises there but I did try looking at the drift and I was hoping to see a bit of an improvement in the very close in phase noise down to a few Hz. I've also tacked the toroid down with some RTV to minimise microphony.

My first drift test (inside the screened enclosure) showed about 20Hz drift in about 20 minutes but the nicest surprise was how much the screened enclosure cleans up the bumps in the close in phase noise. The response is nice and linear and is more like the shape of the theory curve. I also took a regular spectrum analyser plot with a 100Hz span to look at how it behaves at offsets below 10Hz. See attached. This is a spectrum span of just 100Hz and it still looks to be jitter free. This is very good I think.

One odd thing is that the phase noise plot now shows lots of energy at 50Hz and 150Hz and 250Hz. I'm not sure how this is happening yet. It even does it with a battery supply so it isn't from the bench PSU and I don't think it is microphony.

One thing I have done with all the recent tests of the real oscillator is I have corrected the circuit for the misaligned gain/phase response I found in my initial simulations. I think the 1k drain resistance does slightly mess things up here. The phase noise benefit of doing this is fairly insignificant but I think it is a good idea to align the peak in group delay in the resonator with the zero phase point around the loop. This ensures that the feedback happens at the point where the phase slope through the resonator is at its steepest. So this should be good for stability (in theory at least).

This is the little screened enclosure I have here.
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/product.php?pid=5

It is only a desktop enclosure but it has a good spec and seems to work well over a huge frequency range. The connector plate on the back allows easy interfacing to the insides and it seems to be very RF tight.
Attached Thumbnails
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Regards, Jeremy G0HZU
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