[time-nuts] Dumb Cs beam question: mechanical shock sensitivity?
rlutwak at comcast.net
rlutwak at comcast.net
Thu Aug 3 16:33:03 EDT 2006
Yes, a large mechanical disruption may cause a large enough spurious signal to cause a cesium beam clock to lose lock. It is equally likely that your shock caused a discontinuous frequency jump in the OCXO as that it caused a spurious innovation reading from the physics package.
You will find that modern cesium instruments (4310, Cs4000, 5071), with sophisticated firmware servo algorithms, will be considerably less susceptible to mechanical input.
-RL
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-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Christopher Hoover" <ch at murgatroid.com>
> Should I expect a healthy Cs beam standard to lose lock if the unit gets
> a sharp (enough) mechanical shock? I'm just asking about the general
> nature -- obviously implementations will have differing mechanisms for
> and degrees of isolation.
>
> My FTS 4050 lost lock briefly once when I was dropped another piece of
> gear I was loading above it in the same rack. The two events were
> directly correlated. I wasn't terribly suprised, but wasn't sure if
> that was "normal."
>
> It lost lock briefly last night, again, but for unknown reasons. We did
> have a small'ish earthquake, so I'm told ....
>
> -ch
>
> p.s. Look out for some questions on how to deal with outliers and gaps
> in datasets for stability analysis .... I'll pursue the literature
> first; pointers to anything of particular merit would be welcomed
> kindly.
>
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