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To sine or not to sine

A project log for GPS Disciplined xCXO

A DIY GPS disciplined 10 MHz reference clock

nick-sayerNick Sayer 07/22/2015 at 19:300 Comments

Another design choice is selecting the output. It's most convenient for me to just use LVCMOS square wave output. To that end, I've selected a clock fan-out buffer chip to protect the oscillator. It sends one output to the controller and the other three to a 6 pin .1" DIP header as the main output of the device.

This is going to wind up just being a board for sale on Tindie, so I'm not going to go to a great deal of trouble making it fancy. And for my use-case, a square wave is more useful.

But when you're trying to design a product, sometimes you have to give deference to what your customers prefer.

It's easier to turn a sine wave into a square wave (using a Schmidt trigger buffer most likely) than vice versa (you'd use a crystal BPF for that).

What does everyone think? Maybe turn one of the digital outputs into a 1v p-p 50 ohm sine output? Please comment / vote.

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