VLF Receiver Oddments

I’m doing a little more on a simple handheld VLF receiver I’ve been working on. For an electric field receiver all that’s essentially required is a whip antenna and a high input impedance, high gain, audio frequency amplifier. Some filtering is desirable to limit the bandwidth and cut the noise of mains hum.

I’ve already soldered up the input & filter stages, yesterday breadboarded the output stage – an amplifier to drive a little speaker/headphones. But I’d forgotten a key consideration, how much overall gain the thing should have.

A quick google later, found this rather nice poster on NASA’s site, “Building and Testing a Portable VLF Receiver“.

It doesn’t have the schematic – I expect it’s one of their INSPIRE models. But it does have what I was looking for. Signal is of the order of microvolts, their overall gain is x1500 – rather more than I’ve allowed for so far. There’s a feedback resistor change in my near future.

First though I reckon I’ll draw up the circuit as it stands (in KiCAD). I can figure out the gain bits from there, and simulate. I also need to check roll-off at the frequency extremes (call it 20Hz & 20kHz). Hmm, gain of 1500, that’ll be tempting to stability problems.

When I was looking for the gain requirements yesterday, I opened a bunch of the results in browser tabs. I found what I was looking for in the first, but am pleased I didn’t close the others. While vlf.it is the site for all things Radio Nature, I did stumble on some material I hadn’t seen before.

This page is notable : VLF Natural Radio Reception at techlib.com. It features a variety of simple receiver designs. One piece of utter genius jumped out at me. The major problem with VLF reception is interference noise, so ideally you want to situate the receiver a long way from sources of that – eg. houses, computers… Which is a pain if you want to record/analyze the signal. Here the author bends a baby monitor transmitter, replacing the mic with a VLF preamp. Voila, instant remote receiver.

I love this :

“The antenna was horizontal and near the ground under my truck for this recording. That turned out to be a questionable location, by the way! Not only did several neighbors become alarmed by it, but a couple of police officers also spotted the thing. I must admit, it does have a bomb-like appearance! It spent the rest of the night under an overturned flower pot with the VLF antenna sticking out the little drain hole in the bottom.“.

Another very promising site I ran across, have still to read, is Larry’s Very Low Frequency Site. Looks like there’s some good material.

For now, back to the KiCAD.

 

Matching Transistors for Log/Exp Converters

Slightly off-topic again.

I’ve been looking at analog log/exp converters, primarily with music synth applications in mind. Here’s a typical Voltage Controlled Oscillator circuit, which uses a pair of transistors as part of the exponential conversion sub-circuit.  But there may well be potential for using an analog log converter to effectively improve the resolution of the ADC part of a seismic data acquisition system. Note that earthquake magnitude measurements are usually expressed as log values – e.g. in the Richter Scale, a magnitude 5 event has an amplitude 10x that of a magnitude 4 event.

There’s a useful selection of general-purpose log & exp converters in TI Application Note AN-30. When building such circuits from op amps + transistors, there are two factors that can significantly affect accuracy. The first is the effect of temperature on transistor characteristics. This is usually offset by using a temperature-sensitive (‘tempco‘) resistor. I don’t currently have any of these… The second issue is that the circuits generally involve a pair of transistors in a balanced configuration. Here it’s useful to select transistor with closely matched characteristics.

The classic circuit for testing for matching was given by none other than Dr. Robert Moog:

More sophisticated variations are described at Music from Outer Space. I’ve got a bag of 100 2N3904 transistors (about €2 from China), so I decided to have a go at finding some matched pairs.

My circuit began with a silly mistake. I’d misread Moog’s circuit, thinking that both test points were floating, not noticing that one was ground. I only realised once I’d got the thing breadboarded. No big deal, and buffering both lines did offer a bit more scope for experimentation. This is what I ended up with:

I used KiCAD for the diagram, files are on github.

The left-hand side is the same as Moog’s, just with a better op amp and 1% resistors. The right-hand side is a basic instrumentation amplifier consisting of a couple of unity-gain buffers feeding a differential amplifier with gain of 10. I initially tried a gain of 100 (using 220k rather than 22k around U1C), with a bias voltage (from a pot) on pin 5 of U1B, but this turned out to be over-sensitive, it was too easy to flip the output to one rail of the other.

I didn’t see much point in accurate reference voltages as in the MFOS designs, my 12v is regulated and after I’d left everything connected for a little while, there was too much variation in individual measurements.

To do mass comparisons while avoiding touching the transistors (and warming them up), I stuck 40 of them into a breadboard:

Moog refers to Vbe values of around 0.6V, and a target of matching within 2mV. I got similar values, 0.573 +/- 0.001V with only a couple of exceptions (even then less than 3mV difference). This seemed a little too good to be true, so I played around with things like changing the bias voltage, but still the values did seem surprising closely matched. Then a simple sanity check occurred to me. Putting a BC109 under test, this gave a value of 0.553V. Not matched to the 2N3904s.

So it looks like I got lucky 🙂

 

 

Earthquakes, Circles and Spheres

Estimating distance and locating epicentre with the help of a little geometric trick.

Generally P-wave (pressure) is horizontal shaking, S-wave (shear) vertical. S is usually stronger and takes about 6x the time to arrive as the P. Distance in km is approx. 6x time between these in seconds.

Arduino White Noise Generator

Aiming towards 16 bit.

I’ve done a video to demonstrate.

I’m still learning about what can be done with Arduinos, the main target being data acquisition for the ELFQuake project (the material in this post is all about getting stuff out). But as it involves breadboarding, I’ve got another fun target in mind – a hybrid music synth.

I’ve been reading around what other people have done with the things. For analog output, especially when considering music synthesis, there’s a problem that needs solving.

(Note I’ve been playing with an Arduino Uno – some of the other models have improved features).

The Quality Issue

Unless you’re after bitcrushed, lo-fi, glitch sounds, you need a decent sample rate and resolution. For ballpark, CD audio has a 44.1kHz sample rate, offering something under 22kHz bandwidth, see Nyquist frequency. It’s 16-bit, which means in its basic form, it has a Signal/Noise Ratio of about 96dB – though there are tricks to improve this.

A typical digital synth would use a high sample rate through a dedicated Digital-to-Analog (DAC) chip, with associated circuitry to get things into the analog domain. But as they stand though, Arduinos are very much 8 bit-based. You can get 8 bit analog signals out of a digital output pin using Pulse Wave Modulation (PWM), followed by a very simple analog filter. The easiest way is analogWrite(pin, value). But then you pretty much immediately run into the sample rate problem – I can’t remember offhand, but it’s slow. But the Arduino has 3 built-in PWM timers which can be used to get a much better rate (into the 10s of kHz, so tolerable quality should be possible).

When using the interrupts, the code starts getting obfuscated, but the principle is the same as analogWrite().
(TCCRxx refers to control registers, OC1A (Arduino pin 9) and OC1B (Arduino pin 10). For more info check the ATmega328 Datasheet.)

For the resolution, it’s possible to combine the analog from more than one PWM output. There’s some excellent material on the Open Music Labs site about this, but the basic idea is to scale the (analog) values from the PWM outputs, so eg. one is 256x the other, corresponding to the low and high 8 bits of a 16 bit signal. My basic circuit looks like this:

 
D9 ---- 1k --------------|

D10 --- 200k --- 56k ----|---> OUT
                         |
                    10n ===
                         |
                         |
                        GND

However, it can pretty much be guaranteed it won’t be 16 bits coming out of here.

The Mozzi synth project uses the same kind of configuration, but they, more realistically, only aim for max 14 bits (and kinda amusingly, their example of a 14 bit output actually only receives 8 bit values, left-shifted 6 bits, and their circuit uses a 499k/3.9k ratio, specified at 0.5% tolerance…). More generally, I doubt very much if the actual output using the kind of circuit above will get anywhere close to 14 bits.

However (2), my gut feeling is that by paying a little more attention to the analog side, it will be possible to get something like 14+ bits. I plan to experiment on this, using a few little tricks:

• send the digital outputs through voltage-referenced comparators, so they are as close to each other in ‘raw’ state as possible
• buffer the voltage division
• use considerably more sophisticated integration/filtering of the PWM (perhaps independently for each output)

Noise Generation

I must admit to have been gobsmacked to have seen some folks using wavetables to generate noise. The shift register-based generators only need a handful of very low-level processor operations, they should compile down to very fast machine code. Depending where the table is stored, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the computation is faster than the lookup. On a memory-limited device like the Arduino, I’d say it’s worth the trade-off whatever.

To be continued…

Here’s the code (I’ve left in lines that refer to the ADC, might want to use a pot to control freq or level):

*snip*

 

oops – I forgot about all the << and >> in there, so rather than figuring out the markup escaping here, I’ve popped it on github.