[time-nuts] National Standards labs worldwide - specifically Australia

Dr. David Kirkby drkirkby at gmail.com
Sun Jun 29 06:33:30 EDT 2014


I know of NPL in the UK, and NIST in the USA, but is anyone aware of
other "standard labs". In particular I am looking for the Australian
equivalent. A Google search came across "Standards Australia"

http://www.standards.org.au/

but I don't know how "authoritative" this is. There is basically
nothing stopping any body here setting up a web site claiming to be
the countries leading non-government standards labs. I have a very
healthy skepticism of calibration laboratories in general

NIST for example does have a ".gov" domain, which gives it a bit more
credibility than a typical .com.
NPL does not have a .gov, despite we use it in the UK.

I found the The National Measurement Institute (NMI)
http://www.measurement.gov.au/

which is probably the one I am looking for.

There are people on this list who I would trust to produce a list of
national standards labs more than I would from a Google search or
Wikipedia.

There are a couple of things I am looking to find out - neither of
which are very time-nut related, but both are to some extent as they
they involve measuring the phase difference between two signals.

1) There was some work done somewhere (I believe an Australian lab),
which showed that calibrating a VNA with 1/8 and 3/8 offset shorts is
superior to a flush short and 1/4 spacer. Both give the desired 180
degree difference in reflected signal, so at first thought they are
equivalent. I do know the reason the 1/8 and 3/8 are superior, but I'd
like to find a reference.

2) Who in Australia would be best at measuring the reflection
coefficient of a 50 Ohm termination?

-- 
Dr. David Kirkby G8WRB
http://www.vnacalibration.co.uk/
Economical & accurate VNA calibration kits.
Coefficients available for HP, Agilent, Anritsu, Rohde & Schwarz and
VNWA network analyzers.


More information about the time-nuts mailing list