A fiber-optic reference signal transmission system, which transmits the 1.4 GHz reference signal from H-maser to receiver cabin in radio telescopes, was adopted for compensating the phase changes due to temperature variation and antenna movement. At the first experiment, the remote signal’s phase changed more than 15 degrees at 1.4 GHz. We found unstable components in sub-system experiments and replaced them. The main cause of unstable phase stability was the unaligned polarization axis between Laser Diode and Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM). The improved system stability showed 1 × 10-16 allan standard deviation at 1,000 sec integration time with the antenna fixed. When the antenna moves in the azimuth axis, the 1.4 GHz remote signal showed the phase change smaller than 0.2 degrees.
In this paper, we propose a small-scale Gigabit VLBI observing system for the Korean VLBI Network (KVN) under construction. The system consists of high-speed sampler, IP-VLBI board, PC-VSI board, and software correlator. Radio signal received by receiver is sampled by high-speed sample. at 1 Gsps (Gigabit sample per second) rate with 2 bits quantization. The digitized signal is recorded in PC and the software correlator does the cross correlation. IP-VLBI board will be used for the geodesy VLBI observation, while PC-VSI board is for the astronomical VLBI observation. The PC-VSI board adopts the VSI-H (VLBI Standard Interface Hardware). The proposed system is based on commercial PCs and therefore can be built inexpensively.