Avian’s Blog

Last time I was writing about making a small modification for the HackRF to expand the range of signals that can be fed into the external 10 MHz reference input. My initial motivation for it was to sync the ERASynth Micro frequency synthesizer and HackRF in my home-made vector network analyzer. However I thought it might be more broadly useful, so I designed the PCB to fit nicely into off-the-shelf HackRF enclosures. I've now assembled a prototype, verified that it works and written the necessary HackRF firmware and host tools code to support the clock converter circuit.

I installed the clock converter into my HackRF as I described in my previous post. I cut the PCB trace on the HackRF that connects the center pin of the CLKIN SMA connector and the pin 2 of the P22 header. I then soldered three thin wires between the SMA connector and the input on the clock converter board. Two outer wires are ground and the center wire carries the 10 MHz signal. They are quite short. I could use a short coax for this, but wires were simpler and I think that the impedance mismatch of this length won't matter much at 10 MHz.

I've put a footprint for an extra edge-mount SMA connector on the clock converter board. This way it can be used without any destructive modifications to the HackRF. However cutting the trace makes it possible to use the existing connector for connecting the HackRF to an external reference, same as before the modification. This way the modified HackRF fits into cheap off-the-shelf enclosures that provide some extra vertical space above the base PCB. The original molded plastic enclosure is too low unfortunately.

The LTC6957 chip on the clock converter is turned on and configured through spare GPIOs on the HackRF's ARM CPU. It is disabled by default using some pull ups. Hence the HackRF should work as before if the converter board is plugged in but the firmware doesn't know about it. To actually use it, a patched firmware must be uploaded to the HackRF's MCU.

The firmware modifications are largely just boiler plate code that is needed to toggle GPIO pins based on requests over USB. Most of the new code is in clock_conv.c file.

The original README has instructions on how to build and upload the firmware. I didn't have any problems with that on a stock Debian Buster system. Remember to reset the MCU after uploading new firmware using hackrf_spiflash -R.

The only thing that was slightly confusing was the firmware version string that is reported by hackrf_info. The version string is made automatically from the current git tag, or commit SHA1 if tag doesn't exist. However, it only seems to get refreshed when making a new build directory with cmake, not when merely running the build with make.

For the host tools side of things, I patched the new hackrf_clock tool. I added two new command-line arguments: --clkin can be used to enable or disable the LTC6957 and hence the CLKIN input. --clkin-filt can be used to adjust the LTC6957 input filter bandwidth.

You can verify that the HackRF's PLL has locked onto the external reference using hackrf_debug as described in the wiki:

external reference disabled
$ hackrf_clock --clkin 0
$ hackrf_debug --si5351c -n 0 -r
[ 0] -> 0x51

external reference enabled
$ hackrf_clock --clkin 1
$ hackrf_debug --si5351c -n 0 -r
[ 0] -> 0x01

I will post some more detailed measurements of the performance of the modified HackRF later. For now, the simplest way to see the effect of the external clock is to check the frequency offset between HackRF and another device. Here are two screenshots of HackRF Spectrum Analyzer. In both cases I had the antenna input of the HackRF connected to ERASynth Micro via a coaxial cable and some attenuators. ERASynth Micro was set to output a 2420.000 MHz signal. Also, the REF OUT of ERASynth Micro was connected to CLKIN on the HackRF:

This is with the CLKIN disabled (--clkin 0). The signal appears on the spectrum display with an approximately 22 kHz offset, since the ERASynth Micro and the HackRF use their internal quartz references which have slightly different frequency offsets.

This is with the CLKIN enabled (--clkin 1). Now the signal appears exactly at 2420.000 MHz since both devices are synchronized to the common 10 MHz reference (in this case, the TCXO in the ERASynth Micro). Of course, that doesn't mean that the signal is really exactly at 2420.000 MHz, just that both devices now exactly agree on what 2420.000 MHz is.

One interesting thing to note is that the lower screenshot also shows a slightly increased level of phase noise around the signal peak. As far as I can see, this is not due to the clock converter board. Even when CLKIN is used on an unmodified HackRF, received signals seem to exhibit slightly increased phase noise compared to when the internal quartz oscillator is used. I also tried this with a different 10 MHz source, so it's not due to ERASynth Micro either.

I didn't investigate this further. It might be that all my 10 MHz sources are noisy. Another possible cause could be different settings in HackRF's SI5351C. The SI5351C uses a PLL to convert either 25 MHz from the internal quartz or 10 MHz from the CLKIN into a 800 MHz clock. This 800 MHz signal is then used to generate all other clock signals in the HackRF. It might be that the higher PLL divider value (80 versus 32) contributes to this effect.

If you want to modify your HackRF like this, you can find the hardware design files in my hackrf-clock-conv GitHub repository. The modified firmware can be found in my fork of the HackRF repository. If you don't want to bother with making and soldering the PCB yourself, I'm also still collecting interest for a small production run of these boards. Send me an email if you are interested.