[time-nuts] Reliability of atomic clocks

Bill Hawkins bill.iaxs at pobox.com
Sun Mar 27 18:59:48 EDT 2016


Taking Alan Melia's point that there aren't enough of these devices to
establish good statistics and Bob Camp's point that temperature can
cause components to fail before the physics package, I'd suggest that
there is a need to specify the thermal environment for the 15 year run.
How large was the heat sink? Did it have a fan?

Also, the M-100 is the military version of the FRK-L that Collins used
in its Omega navigation receivers, which were rated for commercial
aircraft, probably with redundancy. Mil-spec parts would be somewhat
more reliable than commercial parts.

In my experience with industrial process control systems, anyone who
needed reliability used redundancy, and hoped that the fail-over
software would work. When safety was a concern triple redundancy was
used with 2 of 3 voting for output values.

FWIW

Bill Hawkins

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Sherwood.
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2016 11:34 AM

My Efratom M-100 has been running for about 15 years 24/7.  
I have no idea if that is typical.
It was purchased as NOS for $300.
Rob
NC0B




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