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.

 

[Tim Shoppa]

philvdm@sbcglobal.net 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.