What is implicit in Suresh's entry is that we decided to run the WFS with the 10 dB internal attenuation set to ON as the nominal. In the past, we have always had all the attenuation OFF for max gain. The layout of the WFS is such that we get that nasty 200 MHz oscillation due to crosstalk between the 2 MAX4106 opamps for each quadrant. The 10 dB attenuator is able to reduce the positive feedback enough to damp the oscillation.

In principle, this is still OK noise-wise. I think the thermal noise of the resonant circuit should be ~2-3 nV/rHz. Then the first opamp has a gain of 5, then the -10 dB attenuator, then another gain of 5. The noise going to the demod board is then ~10-15 nV.

The real noise issue will be the input noise of the demod board. As you may recall, the output of the AD831 mixer goes to a AD797. The AD797 is a poor choice for this application. It has low noise only at high frequencies. At 10 Hz, it has an input voltage noise of 10 nV/rHz and a current noise of 20 pA/rHz. If we wanted to use the AD797 here, at least the RC filter's resistor should be reduced to ~500 Ohms. Much better is to use an OP27 and then choose the R so as to optimize the noise.

We should also be careful to keep the filter frequency low enough so as not to rate limit the OP27. From the schematic, you can see that this circuit is also missing the 50 Ohm termination on the output. There ought to be the usual high-order LC low pass at the mixer output. The simple RC is just not good enough for this application.

As a quick fix, I recommend that when we next want to up the WFS SNR, we just replace the RC with an RLC (R = 500 Ohms, L = 22 uH, C = 1 uF).