[time-nuts] Reliability of atomic clocks

Alan Melia alan.melia at btinternet.com
Sun Mar 27 10:52:00 EDT 2016


Hi Attila, I am out of the business now, well retired, so my opinion carries 
little weight,
 :-)) but for whatever it does, my thought is that MTBF is a pretty useless 
parameter in general. This is a relatively low volume unit manufactured by a 
variety of different firms with each their opinion on the best optimum.

The statistical base to MTBF is faulty and in my opinion its only use is to 
indicate where a design might be improved by changing the component mix. The 
actual value that falls out of the end of the calculation for a desgn is 
completely meaningless, but the non-tech bean-counters wanted a way to 
justify more expensive designs, and the purchase of expensive kit.

I would doubt that anyone collected the data on completed units, though 
there may have been spec values quoted. I guess in this usage area most used 
expected them to fail and guarded against it by duplication, the exception 
may be the space environment but I have no experience there.

Good Luck with it
Alan
G3NYK

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Attila Kinali" <attila at kinali.ch>
To: <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2016 12:53 PM
Subject: [time-nuts] Reliability of atomic clocks


> Moin,
>
> Maybe someone here can help me.
> I am looking for data on the reliability of atomic clocks.
> I.e. how often and, if possible, how they fail.
>
> Unfortunately, if I google for reliability then all that pops up
> are descriptions of the accuracy and stability of atomic clocks.
> If I go for MTBF I only get two papers from the 70s that tackle
> the problem in general, without giving any data.
>
> Does someone know where I could find current data about MTBF and
> failure modes of atomic clocks? Given the number of 5071's installed
> in labs, there must be at least some data on them....
>
>
> Attila Kinali
>
> -- 
> Reading can seriously damage your ignorance.
> -- unknown
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