[time-nuts] crystal oscillators & TPLL

Steve Rooke sar10538 at gmail.com
Fri Jun 25 11:31:39 UTC 2010


Charles,

I find it hard to believe that an engineer with your obvious skills
would even need to question the fs issue or ask questions about it's
truth. Even the briefest glance at the block schematic shows that
there is a 100kHz filter in the loop which would limit the lock to
10us given that the oscillators have noise and drift inherent in them.

What's more I'm not apologising for him as he needs no apologist.
There have been no apologies from other quarters as to the way his
ideas were treated with such disdain and I see no apologists for them.

It is not only Warren that has spent some considerable time not just
theorising about this, he has actually verified it's operation
practically by experimentation with a lot of different sources that
were available to him. This is a $10 tester aimed at characterising
the likes of ocxos and I doubt anyone would think of using this to
test a HM by any stretch of the imagination. You speak about him not
verifying some of his claims, well he has claimed that it is useful to
preform ADEV measurements very cheaply and John Miles spent a month,
that is a month, verifying that this was the case with a number of
different targets.

So why has he made various jargon claims. Well, because that is what
you all wanted. When he first introduced his work with a "Hey, I put
this together and it seems to work pretty well", he was subjected to a
barrage of abuse because he did not describe it in a technical jargon
way with all the maths and the five part harmonies so it was dismissed
by certain quarters. They wanted it to go away, like you do I expect.
He felt that the only way to make his idea accepted was to try and
speak in the technical jargon way and I don't have to tell you what
the result of that was. This, of course, angered some who then tried
to haul him over the coals about it. This, in turn, made Warren
frustrated and angry so he started lashing out. Yes, it's a big screw
up but it did not start out that way it was cause by certain elements
on this list. If they had acted with any form of respect in this
manner, I sincerely believe we would not be here today. You have been
here long enough to know exactly what I mean as a number of people
here have been burned in this way. Sure, it's no excuse for any
insults that people think they may have been sent but it does not come
out of the blue.

As for the idea that there has been a "fair attempt" to understand his
ideas, I totally disagree here. It is obvious that Warren is having
trouble explaining things in technical jargon and mathematically but
this seems to be the only form acceptable to members of this list so
there is an impasse here. I have seen no one really try to understand
this thing in just plain old simple terms and help him to put it into
an acceptable form. The very fact that anyone would even consider the
fs thing after just a brief glance of the block diagram totally
surprises me considering how members of this list consider the
strengths of their skills. I can only assume that we have practical
engineers who absolutely need everything right down to the component
level in order for them to understand the concepts and analyse it.
There are obviously none with theoretical skills who are able to gain
full insight from the published block diagram.

Best regards,
Steve

On 25 June 2010 19:05, Charles P. Steinmetz
<charles_steinmetz at lavabit.com> wrote:
> Steve wrote:
>
>> I agree with what you say and really wish we could move forward
>> with this. The only thing that is preventing this happening is the
>> expected reaction that will occur when/if that information is ever
>> released. Unfortunately the concept of constructive criticism is an
>> anathema to some members of this list and this is the blockage.
>
> I must disagree.  I suppose it's good for Warren to have an apologist, but
> you are simply not getting the facts right.  Warren seems to be unable to
> deal with constructive criticism.
>
> What you characterize as attacks by "arrogant naysayers" (and as
> professional engineers looking down on amateur engineers) has, to my
> reading, been a fair attempt by other listmembers to understand Warren's
> TPLL implementation so that they can try to ascertain to what degree it is
> likely to provide useful results over a broader range of conditions than
> those that have been publicly demonstrated.  As we have asked for more
> details so we can try to do this, Warren has responded in every case --
> every case -- with vague allusions to details of his implementation and
> testing he has done, childish accusations that nobody understands anything
> and we all must think he can't add two and two, followed by more and more
> outlandish claims about what his device does (for just one example, "the
> simple analog TPLL method holds the Phase difference [between the reference
> and test oscillators] to zero (with-in 1 femtosecond)" -- Wed, 9 Jun 2010
> 21:05:57 -0700), which (i) cannot be true and (ii) appear to demonstrate
> that Warren not only has not tested at least some of the things that he is
> claiming, but seems not to understand much of the basic subject matter.
>  Warren has had more than ample opportunity to answer any criticism by
> saying calmly that he did "a" (with a decent explanation of what "a" is) and
> got "x" result, and similarly with "b" and "y," "c" and "z," etc., but he
> has not once done so.  One might reasonably conclude after all of the
> smokescreens and refusals that he has not, in fact, done any of the things
> to which he has vaguely alluded.
>
> I know you have said more than once that we should just ignore "the
> femtosecond thing," but why?  (Not that anything turns on this one claim
> anyway -- there are plenty of others like it.)  You yourself called it into
> question (Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:05:26 +1200).  It is a claim Warren made, and
> very specifically -- not that a femtosecond is the resolution of the test
> method stated in units of time (which others have advanced to try to explain
> what he meant), but that his PLL locks two 10 MHz oscillators to within one
> femtosecond of each other and that he has verified this in several ways.  If
> Warren claims this thing (and numerous others that can easily be found in
> the voluminous record) that must be mistaken (or worse), what else that he
> has claimed can we trust?  When you read the posts and make the inferences
> that Warren's statements invite (in many cases, seemingly inescapably), it
> appears that the only trustworthy information we have about the operation of
> Warren's TPLL is what John published -- which indicates that the method has
> promise -- perhaps even considerable promise -- but is far from the proof
> Warren seems to think it is that his device fulfills all of his claims or
> has been characterized to the point that others can predict under what
> conditions they can rely on it.
>
> So, please, don't make Warren out as the poor, well-meaning basement
> inventor being bashed by the "professionals."  His childish tantrums,
> insults, and outlandish claims are his and his alone.  Even if we assume for
> the sake of argument that he was hard done by (which I do not believe is
> true), that would not excuse his responses.  It would have been one thing to
> say, "Hey, I put this together and it seems to work pretty well" and leave
> it at that, but that is not what Warren did.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
- Einstein



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