Portable Microwave Frequency Dissemination in Free Space and Implications on Ground-Satellite Synchronization

Abstract

Frequency dissemination and synchronization in free space plays an important role in global navigation satellite system, radio astronomy and synthetic aperture radar. In this paper, we demonstrate a portable radio frequency dissemination scheme via free space using microwave antennas. The setup has a good environment adaptability and high dissemination stability. The frequency signal is disseminated at different distances ranging from 10 to 640 m with a fixed 10 Hz locking bandwidth, and the scaling law of dissemination stability on distance and averaging time is discussed. The preliminary extrapolation shows that the dissemination stability may reach $1\times 10^{-12}/s$ in ground-to-satellite synchronization, which far exceeds all present methods, and is worthy for further study.

5 pages, 4figures. Updated as the Review of Scientific Instruments published version