Improved phase-ellipse method for in-situ geophone calibration

For amplitude and phase response calibration of moving-coil electromagnetic geophones two parameters are needed, namely, the geophone natural frequency, f₀, and the geophone upper resonance frequency f_u. The phase-ellipse method is commonly used for the in situ determination of these parameters. For a given signal-to-noise ratio, the precision of the measurement off₀ andf_u depends on the phase sensitivity, f(δφ/δf) For some commercial geophones f(δφ/δf) atf_u can be an order of magnitude less than the sensitivity atf₀. In this paper we present an improved phase-ellipse method with increased precision. Compared to measurements made with the existing phase-ellipse methods, our method shows a 6- and 3-fold improvement in the precision, respectively, on measurements of f₀ andf_u on a commercial geophone.