While digital signals tend to be more immune to noise as measured in a
nalog systems, other noise related phenomena such as bit errors can ca
use problems which are equally as undesirable. This paper will address
one such noise artifact which is jitter in a digital bit stream. Whil
e the typical of measuring jitter is with a sampling oscilloscope, a n
ew technique using modulation domain analyzers was used. This method a
llows direct measurement of the spectral content of jitter. This techn
ique has been used in the telecommunications industry and examples of
their specifications are provided.