Re: [LAU] jdelay

From: Fons Adriaensen <fons@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Wed Apr 11 2007 - 14:27:27 EEST

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:44:29AM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:

> BTW. would it be unreasonable to "fix" jdelay to work with an amp&mic ?

It will work via speaker an mic if both are linear phase (very unlikely
for speaker) and there are no significant reflections (echos) in the signal.
It can't be 'fixed' to work in other conditions - you need something
different. But jdelay is meant to measure sound card latency and not
delays in arbitrary channels.

> Does the phase-measurement depend on electrical characteristics that get
> "blurred" in mid-air? - Is there documentation for the algorithm used in
> jdelay ?

That will be difficult to find. The algo used is one developed some 40
years ago - and still used today - to measure the round-trip delay (and
hence distance) between a satellite and a ground station.

It requires a transmission channel with a linear phase characteristic
(same delay at all frequencies). This is easy to have on a space link.
On the other hand it can be made to work with very weak signals and
lots of noise, and with delays that are not constant but a function of
time. The equipment I designed while at Alcatel will operate reliably
with an input S/N ratio of -40 dB (yes, _minus_ forty) and will provide
an accuracy of a few centimeters (depending on how long you measure).

The algo uses a number of tones with frequencies F0, F1, F2, ...
and measures the phase difference between input and output for each
of them. Let P0, P1, P2, ... be those measured phases, expressed in
_cycles_. Let D (in seconds) be the delay we try to measure, and let
{x}, 0 <= {x} < 1 be the fractional part of x, i.e. x - floor(x).
The algo calculates V = D * F0, the delay expessed in cycles of F0.

Clearly we will have Pi = { D * Fi } for all i.

V = P0

This is the first estimate. The accuracy depends only on how good
the phase measurement is done, but it is of course ambiguous if the
delay can be more than one cycle.

The other tones will be used to resolve this ambiguity. We select
F1 so that

gcd (F0, F1) = F1 / 8.

Now consider the value N1 = 8 * P1 - P0. This will be an integer
in the range 0 to 7, plus some fraction due to meassurement error.
So we set

V = V + round (N1)

If the delay can be longer than 8 cycles of F0 then this is still
ambiguous. We select F2 so that

gcd (F0, F2) = F1 / 64.

Now consider N2 = 8 * P2 - P1. Again this will be an integer in
the range 0...7 plus some measurement error. So we set

V = V + 8 * round (N2)

We now have a measurement range of 64 cycles of F0. The other
tones are used in the same way to multiply this range by 8 for
each tone used. until the ambiguity-free range is large enough.

In jdelay F0 is Fsample / 8. The '??' are printed when the distance
between Ni and the nearest integer is more than 0.2, which indicates
that the signal is not reliable.

-- 
FA
Follie! Follie! Delirio vano è questo !
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Received on Wed Apr 11 16:15:05 2007

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