[time-nuts] Thinking outside the box a super reference

Attila Kinali attila at kinali.ch
Thu Nov 3 18:10:21 EDT 2016


On Thu, 3 Nov 2016 16:37:06 -0400
Ruslan Nabioullin <rnabioullin at gmail.com> wrote:

> What about instead establishing an open-source hardware project for a 
> frequency standard fusor?  I was researching COTS solutions for this for 
> my rubidium ensemble and could only find this one product, which 
> obviously should be exorbitant in cost: 

You don't need a hardware project for this, as long as a paper clock
is enough for you. Just buy a couple of kiwi-sdr (or anything similar),
provide all of them with a common clock source and you get a comparison
of all your atomic clocks with minimum effort and can build from that
a paper clock easily. The paper clock can than be used for the measurement
you do, using one of the atomic clocks (preferably the one with the lowest
phase noise) as reference.

If you really want to have a physical realization, things become quite
interesting and not easy to handle. There are two parts of the problem,
one is to steer an frequency source accurately, and the other is to
generate the steering value in realtime. Neither of those is trivial.
Especially for the latter one, there is still a lot of research going on.

			Attila Kinali

-- 
Malek's Law:
        Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.


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