Dissemination stability and phase noise characteristics in a cascaded, fiber-based long-haul radio frequency dissemination network

To study the dissemination stability and phase noise characteristics of the cascaded fiber-based RF dissemination, we perform an experiment using three sets of RF modulated frequency dissemination systems. The experimental results show that the total transfer stability of the cascaded system can be given by σ(T)(2)=∑(i=1)(N)σ(i)(2) (σ(i) is the frequency dissemination stability of the ith segment and N is the quantity of segments). Furthermore, for each segment, the phase noise of recovered frequency signal is also measured. The results show that for an N-segment, cascaded dissemination system, its stability degrades only by a factor of N. This sub-linear relation makes the cascaded, RF-dissemination method a very attractive one for long-haul, time and frequency dissemination network.