The New Hotness

Just to see if the resonator test fixture produced meaningful results, I plugged a 3.57954 MHz color burst crystal into the socket:

Quartz test fixture - 3.57954 MHz crystal — Quartz test fixture – 3.57954 MHz crystal

This is a staged recreation based on actual events; pay no attention to the Colpitts oscillators growing in the background.

Attaching goesinta and goesouta cables to the HP 8591 spectrum analyzer & tracking generator showed it worked just fine:

Quartz 3.57954 MHz - no cap — Quartz 3.57954 MHz – no cap

The reference level is -40 dBm, not the usual 0 dBm, due to the loss in those resistive pads. Unsurprisingly, the parallel resonance valley looks pretty ragged at -120 dBm = 1 nW = 7 µV.

Remove the jumper to put the capacitor in series:

Quartz 3.57954 MHz - 36.4pF — Quartz 3.57954 MHz – 36.4pF

The marker delta resolution surely isn’t 1 Hz, but 750 Hz should get us in the right ballpark.

Substituting a 72 Ω resistor, found by binary search rather than twiddling a pot:

Quartz 3.57954 MHz - 72ohm — Quartz 3.57954 MHz – 72ohm

Which gives us all the measurements:

Fs = 3.57824 MHz
Fc = Fs + 750 Hz = 3.57899 MHz
Rm = 72 Ω
C0 = 3.83 pF
Cpar = 3.70 pF

Turn the crank and the crystal motional parameters pop out:

Lm = 117 mH
Cm = 17 fF
Rm = 72 Ω
Q = 36 k

Looks like a pretty good crystal to me!

The New Hotness

Quartz Resonator Test Fixture: 3.58 MHz Crystal Test