[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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