I measured the conversion efficiencies for all the RFPD demod boards except the POP port ones. An RF source was used to drive the PD input on the demod board, one at a time, and the I/F outputs were monitored on a 300 MHz oscilloscope. The efficiency is measured as the percentage ratio V_IF / V_RF.
I will upload the full report later, but basically, the numbers I measured today are within 10% of what I measured in 2017 when I previously did such a characterization. The orthogonality also seems fine.
I believe I restored all the connections at 1Y2 correctly, and I can lock POX/POY and PRMI on 1f signals after my work. I will do the noise characterization tomorrow - but I think this test already rules out any funkiness with the demod setup (e.g. non orthogonality of the digitized "I" and "Q" signals). The whitening part of the analog chain remains untested.
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But I would still bet on demod chain funniness
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Update 2/23 1215: I've broken up the results into the demod boards that do not (Attachment #1) and do (Attachment #2) have a D040179 preamp installed. Actually, the REFL11 AO path also has the preamp installed, but I forgot to capture the time domain data for those channels. The conversion efficiency inferred from the scope was ~5.23 V/V, which is in good agreement with what I measured a few years ago.
- The scope traces were downloaded.
- The resulting X/Y traces are fitted with ellipses to judge the gain imbalance and orthogonality.
- The parameter phi is the rotation of the "bounding box" for the fitted ellipses - if the I and Q channels are exactly orthogonal, this should be either 0 or 90 degrees. There is significant deviation from these numbers for some of the demodulators, do we want to do something about this? Anyways, the REFL11 and AS55 boards, which are used for PRMI locking, report reasonable values. But REFL165 shows an ellipse with significant rotation. This is probably how the CDS phase rotator should be tuned, by fitting an ellipse to the digitized I/Q data and then making the bounding box rotation angle 0 by adjusting the "Measured Diff" parameter.
- The gain imbalance seems okay across the board, better than 1dB.
- The POX and POY traces are a bit weird, looks like there is some non-trivial amount of distortion from the expected pure sinusoid.
- I measured the LO input levels going into each demod board - they all lie in the range 2-3dBm (measured with RF power meter), which is what is to be expected per the design doc. The exception the the 165 MHz LO line, which was 0.4 dBm. So this board probably needs some work.
- As I mentioned earlier, the conversion efficiencies are consistent with what I measured in 2017. I didn't break out the Eurocards using an extender and directly probe the LO levels at various points, but the fact that the conversion efficiencies have not degraded and the values are consistent with the insertion loss of various components in the chain make me believe the problem lies elsewhere.
For completeness, I will measure the input terminated I/F output noise levels later today. Note also that my characterization of the optical modulation profile did not reveal anything obviously wrong (to me at least). |