Characterization of the frequency stability of frequency-hopping sources

A method that applies time-domain stability measures, hitherto used only in the context of fixed-frequency sources, to the characterization of frequency-hopped sources is introduced. This method has been successfully applied to the testing of a novel practical frequency-hopping synthesizer. It is shown that despite the fact that hopping sources exhibit an orders-of-magnitude larger amount of short term noise than stable free-running frequency sources, some of the techniques used to estimate the noise of stable sources are also applicable to hopping voltage-controlled oscillator systems.