High-Precision Measurement of Sine and Pulse Reference Signals Using Software-Defined Radio

This paper addresses simultaneous high-precision measurement and analysis of generic reference signals by using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf software-defined radio hardware. Sine reference signals are digitally downconverted to baseband for the analysis of phase deviations. Hereby, we compar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on instrumentation and measurement 2018-05, Vol.67 (5), p.1132-1141
Main Authors: Andrich, Carsten, Ihlow, Alexander, Bauer, Julia, Beuster, Niklas, Del Galdo, Giovanni
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
1 pulse per second (1 PPS)
10 MHz
Clocks
Commercial off-the-shelf technology
computerized instrumentation
Digital signal processing
digital signal processing (DSP)
dual-mixer time difference (DMTD)
Floating point arithmetic
Hardware
Measurement methods
measurement techniques
Phase measurement
Pulse measurements
Radio signals
reference signal
Reference signals
Signal analysis
Signal processing
Slopes
Software
Software radio
software-defined radio (SDR)
Synchronization
time interval counter (TIC)
time measurement
time-domain analysis
Time-frequency analysis
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Summary:This paper addresses simultaneous high-precision measurement and analysis of generic reference signals by using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf software-defined radio hardware. Sine reference signals are digitally downconverted to baseband for the analysis of phase deviations. Hereby, we compare the precision of the fixed-point hardware digital signal processing chain with a custom single instruction multiple data x86 floating-point implementation. Pulse reference signals are analyzed by a software trigger that precisely locates the time where the slope passes a certain threshold. The measurement system is implemented and verified using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) N210 by Ettus Research LLC. Applying standard 10 MHz and 1 PPS reference signals for testing, a measurement precision (standard deviation) of 0.36 and 16.6 ps is obtained, respectively. In connection with standard PC hardware, the system allows long-term acquisition and storage of measurement data over several weeks. A comparison is given to the dual-mixer time difference and time interval counter, which are state-of-the-art measurement methods for sine and pulse signal analysis, respectively. Furthermore, we show that our proposed USRP-based approach outperforms measurements with a high-grade digital sampling oscilloscope.
ISSN:0018-9456
1557-9662
DOI:10.1109/TIM.2018.2794940