I want to build a soil moisture measurement probe based on this idea:
An oscillator feeds a transmission line burried in a soil via a termination resistor R1, XOR gate acts as a phase shift detector - it will be high untill a reflection comes back from the transmission line. More water in soil - higher the dielectric constant, longer it takes for the reflection to come back, higher the voltage after R2C1 filter. I'm going to implement the transmission line as a trace on a PCB, i'm thinking about frequency of 80MHz and transmission line length of ~40cm.
My question is will an oscillator like CB3-3C-80M0000 be able to drive the transmission line or do I need some buffering? If so, what buffer would be suitable for speeds like these?