Hi,
On 29.05.2013 17:53, Andreas Seltenreich wrote:
I just found this discussion on the topic after sending some patches to the list (pending moderation)...
I didn't see them yet, I guess Harald has to manually approve them because you weren't subscribed yet when you sent them?
Well, my two sticks do still enumerate nicely with the change. I wonder if eeproms other than 2kbit ones are in use though, as that would make "last four bytes" slightly ambiguous...
All sticks I've seen so far use a 24C02 with 256 Bytes, so that should be fine.
(Of course the ppm value still changes with temperature, but having a base value is still closer to the truth than 0ppm I'd say. I measured the offset directly after grabbing samples for 20 minutes at room-temperature and jitter is <1ppm.)
After warmup, plotting the output of kalibrate-rtl[1] with my specimens indicates an accuracy of about 0.1ppm as long as the room temperature doesn't deviate more than 1K.
Alan Corey writes:
While you're at it it would be nice to use maybe at least a 16 bit value if possible. I had mine all worked out to about 5 or 6 places then found I could only store what might be an 8 bit integer. SDR Sharp would only store mine as 102 instead of about 102.4567. Since the correction is done in software there shouldn't be a limit on the size (data type) of the number.
Hmm, my solution would yield a resolution of about 0.035ppm. A better resolution is probably not meaningful when calibrating a plain XO.
I'm not entirely sure if storing the absolute frequency is the right way to go. The benefit that the application doesn't need to do anything is nice on the one hand, but it doesn't really know about the compensation as well. Okay, it could call rtlsdr_get_tuner_clock()...
Also, for correcting the sample clock it's better to use rtlsdr_set_sample_freq_correction() instead of changing the value of rtl_xtal, because it has (in theory) a much finer granularity than rtlsdr_set_sample_rate. But right now we only pass an integer as parameter for the ppm-value, so we can't use that granularity. Changing it to ppb would make sense in my opinion.
My initial idea was storing the correction value in ppb in the eeprom, along with some redundancy or a 'magic' check value (so that seemingly random data on unprogrammed sticks isn't interpreted as a correct correction value). But then there's the question on how applications should deal with that, as in: should a call to rtlsdr_set_freq_correction() override the setting which has been read from the eeprom, or should it be applied 'on-top'?
I'd go for override, and try to make sure that applications call rtlsdr_get_freq_correction() to get the initial value first.
Regards, Steve