[time-nuts] Thunderbolt Power Supply Question

Arthur Dent golgarfrincham at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 27 13:13:42 UTC 2010


Bob Camp-"The point is that you can indeed get into trouble before the internal 
regulator drops out. How much trouble depends on the design of the heater."

I'm not disputing that there might be other effects of dropping the supply voltage 
close to the point where the regulator will lose regulation but I'm not suggesting 
anyone do that either. The original question which I was responding to was (quote):
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"Won't an unregulated, but relatively steady, +12 supply degrade the performance 
of the oscillator or does the Tbolt have a built-in regulator to deal with this?"
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The answer is that probably (untested but likely) this Trimble oscillator has internal 
regulation of the oscillator circuit and almost any switching regulated supply will 
work fine to operate the Thunderbolt within specs. The +12VDC specs allow from 
+10.8 to 13.2VDC on the +12VDC line. One of my Thunderbolts is running on 
+11.86VDC and that doesn't worry me one bit. Trimble spec-ed the +12VDC supply
as  +/-10% and I have to believe they had some clue as to what they were doing. 



      


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