Posts related to time, time interval, and frequency generation and measurement.
It’s well known that just about all oscillators drift, or “age”, in frequency with time. In crystal oscillators, the most drift occurs when the oscillator is young, and over time the aging rate decreases. Power-cycling the oscillator results in a new stabilization period before the aging rate stabilizes. The best
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My faithful HP 5065A Rubidium standard, which had been converted to a “Super” model, developed an intermittent sickness and back it went to Corby Dawson for him to perform his magic. After a realignment and fixing an intermittent connector ground, it’s back in the lab and working well, though minus
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I was lucky enough to find an HP 5061B cesium standard with what I think is a virtually new high performance (option 004) tube. These are rare because the high performance tubes burn up their cesium supply much more quickly than the normal ones. But you get much improved stability
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I set my HP 5065A Rubidium standard to the 5071A. Unlike a Cesium clock, the Rubidium system does have some drift so it needs to be tweaked occasionally. I plan to come back to this post every few months to update and see if we can determine the aging rate.
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I compared my old HP 5061A cesium standard against a much newer HP 5071A with high performance tube. Cesium standards are tweaked by adjust an electromagnet in the tube; this adjustment is called the “C Field.” In the 5061A you need to set the C Field manually, but the 5071A
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This is the first of several boring posts where I’m documenting the offset of a couple of my frequency standards so that I can come back later and determine aging rate.
This is my Oscilloquartz 8607-008 BVA quartz oscillator. I don’t know the last time it was adjusted, but when
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I’ve continued processing the data generated from software-defined-radio recordings I made during the 2017 solar eclipse at my fairly isolated and low-RF-noise location on Beaver Island, Michigan (45 38 38 N, 85 29 24 W, grid square EN75gp). The nearest AM station is about 28 miles away, so it’s a
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I set up a smaller version of my mad-scientist stuff at our cottage on Beaver Island, Michigan (45 38 38 N, 85 29 24 W, grid square EN75gp), to record the RF spectrum before, during, and after the eclipse on August 21, 2017. The recordings were successful, and I captured
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It wasn’t too hard for the HamSci guys to convince me to bring a Cesium frequency standard to my portable location in Michigan to drive the HPSDR receiver that will do band recordings for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse HF Wideband Recording Experiment. I had been planning to use
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Several years ago I designed a little circuit board called the T2-Mini that provides life support for one of Tom Van Baak’s very wonderful picDIV PIC-based frequency dividers. The idea is to convert the 1, 2.5, 5, or 10 MHz output from a frequency standard to a one pulse-per-second
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