[time-nuts] Frequency Stability of Trimble Mini-T

SAIDJACK at aol.com SAIDJACK at aol.com
Thu Oct 16 19:21:29 UTC 2008


Hi there,
 
exactly! What about units that jump only once every say 12 months or  so?
 
I can't find much fundamental research on this at all; and if even Mr. Vig  
says the phenomenon is not well understood.. But there are (propriatary) ways 
to  probe for the susceptibility of a particular unit to do this.
 
We have done some extensive research trying to correlate jumps to external  
phenomena (radiation, vibration, thermal effects, etc). There is no straight  
forward correlation.
 
It's similar to asynchronous switching inside a digital computer. You can  
add levels of flip flops to synchronize across two asynchronous time-domains,  
but all you are doing is decreasing the possibility of a meta-stable failure to 
 make it through the flops. Statistically you can never guarantee that there  
won't be a failure at all; even if the MTBF is 10 Million years by using five 
 levels of synchronization etc, a failure could actually happen after 10s of  
operation.
 
The good news is: there are mitigating factors. Most jumps are in the  E-011 
or E-010 range, and most applications won't even be affected by such  an 
extremely small frequency change, and we have GPS to quickly correct the  
aberration.
 
I would not be surprised if your standard computer crystal has jumps in the  
range of E-07 that happen all the time, and no one notices.
 
As Mike said, most specs that require performance of E-010 or better are  
somewhat bogus, and don't have real-world requirements that come close  to the 
paper spec. So we try to improve the state of the art as best as we  can.
 
bye,
Said
 
 
In a message dated 10/16/2008 11:31:32 Pacific Daylight Time,  
hmurray at megapathdsl.net writes:


>  the problem is one of statistics. Not all crystals exhibit this, one
>  may find only about 20% or so of a typical manufacturers OCXO will
>  exhibit these jumps, and with varying intensity. 

There is another  dimension.  How often do the jumps happen?

Do the other 80% make  jumps if you wait longer?





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