In the last weeks I’ve been working on the design of an electronic board to measure directly the power of the main spectral lines on of the RF-AM photodiode from as many independent outputs. The idea is to have eventually a monitor channel in the CDS network for the power of each line.
Looking at at the spectrum from the RF-AM PD (see attached plot), there are 5 main lines:
Frequency
3 fsr = 33 195 439 Hz
4 fsr = 66 390 878 Hz
12 fsr = 132 781 756 Hz
15 fsr = 165 977 195 Hz
18 fsr = 199 172 634 Hz
Two main approaches have been proposed for the circuit depending on the way followed to isolate the lines:
1) Filters: the frequencies are separated by narrow notch filters, then a diode bridge rectifies and a low pass filter extracts the DC component.
2) Mixers: for each frequency there is a mixer driven by a copy of the correspondent modulation frequency provided by the function generators (the Marconi). The mixers automatically give the DC component of the rectified signals.
Because of the phase lags that we should compensate if we used mixers, we would prefer the first approach, if it works.
Starting with a tolerance of about 10% between the channels, the spectrum (see attachment) sets the constraint to the filter’s suppression:
Filter central frequency [MHz]******Suppression within 30 Mhz [dB]
33*********************************-7-20 = -27
66**********************************7-20 = -13
133*********************************12-20 = -8
166********************************-12-20 = -32
199*********************************10-20 = 10
So far I’ve tried two kinds of designs for the filters, Butterworth (see attachment) and LC and I'm measuring transfer functions tuning the components to match the central frequency and the bandwdth of the filters with the requirements.
The frequencies we’re dealing with are rather high and several adjustments had to be done to the measurement system in order to shield the circuit from the impedance of the input and the output line (i.e., amplifier turned out to be necessary). Also, an the mixer had to be replaced to an RF one.
It seems I'm now measuring new transfer functions (which look quite different from what I've got with no amplifiers).
To be posted soon. |