Month: September 2015

Microsemi/Symmetricom 3120A noise floor

This was measured by taking a H-maser 10MHz signal (output from a frequency distribution amplifier) and splitting it in two for the 3120A REF and DUT channels with a ZFSC-2-1+ passive splitter.

The first measurement is with 50 Hz bandwidth and a duration of 5 minutes. The second measurement is at 5 Hz bandwidth and ran overnight for 12 hours.

Here's the ADEV plot with some typical performance-curves added.

floor_with_comments

Data from:

SRS FS710 noise measurement

Update: changing the main electrolytic capacitors as well as the tantalum caps around the 7805/7905 voltage regulators did not help. There is still about 600 mVpp of ripple on the +/- 13.9 VDC inputs to the regulators.

Here's a noise measurement on an old second-hand SRS FS710 distribution amplifier. I wonder if the excessive noise at 50 Hz and harmonics is within spec or a result of old age?

Measurement setup: 10MHz signal to a Mini-Circuits ZFSC-2-1+ splitter, one branch to 3120A REF-input, the other branch to the FS710 input, and FS710 output1 to the 3120A DUT input. Noise floor was measured with the same setup but bypassing the FS710.

White Rabbit Switch noise measurement

I measured the CLK2 10 MHz RF-output of two White Rabbit switches with a Microsemi 3120A. The results are similar to previous results with ADEV(1s)=1.5e-11.

When phase-locked to an external reference clock the long-term stability is obviously much better than when free-running, but for small tau, or high offset-frequency in the phase noise plot, the free running oscillator is actually better.

Intel Atom C255Xs

The Atom C255X is becoming a popular processor in not-so-demanding low power boxes.

Here's a pfsense SG-4860 router/firewall using a C2558 (15W) processor and 8 Gb of RAM. It comes with 4 Gb of on-board flash storage, so the external mSATA drive (lower edge, just above the Ethernet connectors) is not required unless you need to store very big pfsense logfiles. No moving parts, passive cooling only. Although pfsense-branded (running FreeBSD + pfsense), under the hood it's probably an ADI Engineering RCC-VE.
pfsense_sg-4860

Here's a SuperMicro 5018A-MLTN4 with a C2550 (14W) processor in a 1U 19" rack enclosure. SSD drive and 8 Gb of RAM. I suspect the front fan is quite overkill and could be slowed down a lot or completely removed. The built-in graphics produce not-so-great performance under Ubuntu, but with lubuntu-desktop it's usable as a lab server that you need to configure or check only once a week or so.
supermicro_5018A-MLTN4