Re: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator
Hi How short a time interval (and how long) are you interested in? How good do you expect the oscillator to be? Bob On Mar 19, 2013, at 12:10 AM, John Doering johndoerin...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all! First time poster here, but I've been lurking for a couple months and found this place to be highly informative. I want to measure TIE for a 7.362 MHz oscillator. Ultimately, I want to process into TDEV and MTIE. 1) Is it acceptable to use the DMTD method and set a signal generator (driven by rubidium) as the reference frequency to a value equal to the oscillator's? 2) If not, can you point me to a more proper way of doing this type of measurement for arbitrary frequencies that are not easily divisible into 10 MHz? Thank you! ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
[time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
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Re: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator
Hi One other important question - is this a basement project, or is it part of your day job? Put another way - are you after a quick / dirty / cheap solution or is there a real budget behind the question? If it's a day job sort of thing, there are a number of test sets out there that will do the job just fine. Bob -Original Message- From: time-nuts-boun...@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-boun...@febo.com] On Behalf Of John Doering Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 12:11 AM To: time-nuts@febo.com Subject: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator Hi all! First time poster here, but I've been lurking for a couple months and found this place to be highly informative. I want to measure TIE for a 7.362 MHz oscillator. Ultimately, I want to process into TDEV and MTIE. 1) Is it acceptable to use the DMTD method and set a signal generator (driven by rubidium) as the reference frequency to a value equal to the oscillator's? 2) If not, can you point me to a more proper way of doing this type of measurement for arbitrary frequencies that are not easily divisible into 10 MHz? Thank you! ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
I don't have a Loran receiver but last night in the Boston area I definitely was able to pick up a strong Loran signal. Peter On 3/19/2013 11:33 AM, paul swed wrote: ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1430 / Virus Database: 2641/5688 - Release Date: 03/19/13 ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
Peter you are in boston, I am in franklin. We must be 25-30 miles apart Regards Paul On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Peter Gottlieb n...@verizon.net wrote: I don't have a Loran receiver but last night in the Boston area I definitely was able to pick up a strong Loran signal. Peter On 3/19/2013 11:33 AM, paul swed wrote: __**_ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/** mailman/listinfo/time-nutshttps://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1430 / Virus Database: 2641/5688 - Release Date: 03/19/13 __**_ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/** mailman/listinfo/time-nutshttps://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 01:29:44PM -0400, paul swed wrote: Peter you are in boston, I am in franklin. We must be 25-30 miles apart Regards Paul Peter lives about 3 miles from my house in Weston... in a corner of Natick abutting Weston. So three of us are quite close. John Forster lives in Belmont (or did)... which is also pretty close. -- Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, d...@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten 'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
So Boston reclaims the technology capital of the world with all of the time-nuttery folks around here. And to think people believe its silicon valley. I know John and I get to the MIT flea and perhaps its one of you two that I have seen walking off with the widget I was looking for and missed out on by a few minutes. :-) Regards Paul. On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:03 PM, David I. Emery d...@dieconsulting.comwrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 01:29:44PM -0400, paul swed wrote: Peter you are in boston, I am in franklin. We must be 25-30 miles apart Regards Paul Peter lives about 3 miles from my house in Weston... in a corner of Natick abutting Weston. So three of us are quite close. John Forster lives in Belmont (or did)... which is also pretty close. -- Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, d...@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten 'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
We should get together, especially since I was laid off a couple of weeks ago (after the place I worked went Ch 11 and was bought by the Chinese) and have some free time. Peter On 3/19/2013 2:03 PM, David I. Emery wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 01:29:44PM -0400, paul swed wrote: Peter you are in boston, I am in franklin. We must be 25-30 miles apart Regards Paul Peter lives about 3 miles from my house in Weston... in a corner of Natick abutting Weston. So three of us are quite close. John Forster lives in Belmont (or did)... which is also pretty close. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
Well if it ever stops snowing I plan on hitting the MIT fleas (and NEARfest) again this year! Peter On 3/19/2013 2:45 PM, paul swed wrote: So Boston reclaims the technology capital of the world with all of the time-nuttery folks around here. And to think people believe its silicon valley. I know John and I get to the MIT flea and perhaps its one of you two that I have seen walking off with the widget I was looking for and missed out on by a few minutes. :-) Regards Paul. On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:03 PM, David I. Emery d...@dieconsulting.comwrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 01:29:44PM -0400, paul swed wrote: Peter you are in boston, I am in franklin. We must be 25-30 miles apart Regards Paul Peter lives about 3 miles from my house in Weston... in a corner of Natick abutting Weston. So three of us are quite close. John Forster lives in Belmont (or did)... which is also pretty close. -- Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, d...@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten 'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1430 / Virus Database: 2641/5688 - Release Date: 03/19/13 ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
[time-nuts] WWVB Clocks don't sync anymore (revisited)
A few weeks ago I posted a question/comment about some of my WWVB-based Atomic clocks no longer setting themselves properly. These two clocks, SkyScan #86716, would show the symbol indicating that they had set themselves, but their time was drifting away from UTC. Interestingly, they *would* set themselves exactly once upon installation of the battery, but never again. Since that time, I've done a bit of digging around. The first suspicion was that, perhaps, the NIST had fudged a bit in the WWVB timecode recently, so I manually decoded a few frames and analyzed them: Nothing suspicious there. The next question was if the addition of the BPSK somehow skewed the timing of the TRF's AGC/threshold - but logically, this didn't make sense since the clock *did* set itself exactly ONCE - and it wouldn't have been able to do this at all were this the case. Out of curiosity I poked around on the board and found the trace containing the time code and found that despite the BPSK, its timing was exactly as it should have been: No surprise there. This left the clock itself, so I did what any other Time Nut would do: I built a WWVB simulator. Initially, I set it to a 2010 date - a time that I knew that the clock worked properly. I had two clocks: One that I'd just reset by pulling and replacing the battery while the other had been stuck for a few weeks, not resetting itself nightly as it should. I put both of these in the coupling loops from my WWVB simulator and over the next few days, the recently re-set clock happily synchronized itself while the other one with the 2013 date was still stuck. I then reset that clock and it, too, behaved itself from then on. I then reset the clock on the simulator to a February 2013 date and time. Initially, both clocks reset themselves to the current time and date at their next midnight, but after that, they got stuck, never resetting themselves at night again. So, it appears to be a problem with Broken Sand (e.g. a silicon problem). For the morbidly curious, I have documented my efforts here: http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/02/did-nist-break-bunch-of-radio.html - The initial testing http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/03/yes-nist-did-break-bunch-of-radio.html - The testing with the WWVB simulator 73, Clint KA7OEI ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] WWVB Clocks don't sync anymore (revisited)
Someone pointed out a typo: I wrote model number 86716 where I meant to write 86715 for the SkyScan clock in question. In the linked web pages it is correct, however. 73, Clint KA7OEI Clint Turner wrote: A few weeks ago I posted a question/comment about some of my WWVB-based Atomic clocks no longer setting themselves properly. These two clocks, SkyScan #86716, would show the symbol indicating that they had set themselves, but their time was drifting away from UTC. Interestingly, they *would* set themselves exactly once upon installation of the battery, but never again. Since that time, I've done a bit of digging around. The first suspicion was that, perhaps, the NIST had fudged a bit in the WWVB timecode recently, so I manually decoded a few frames and analyzed them: Nothing suspicious there. The next question was if the addition of the BPSK somehow skewed the timing of the TRF's AGC/threshold - but logically, this didn't make sense since the clock *did* set itself exactly ONCE - and it wouldn't have been able to do this at all were this the case. Out of curiosity I poked around on the board and found the trace containing the time code and found that despite the BPSK, its timing was exactly as it should have been: No surprise there. This left the clock itself, so I did what any other Time Nut would do: I built a WWVB simulator. Initially, I set it to a 2010 date - a time that I knew that the clock worked properly. I had two clocks: One that I'd just reset by pulling and replacing the battery while the other had been stuck for a few weeks, not resetting itself nightly as it should. I put both of these in the coupling loops from my WWVB simulator and over the next few days, the recently re-set clock happily synchronized itself while the other one with the 2013 date was still stuck. I then reset that clock and it, too, behaved itself from then on. I then reset the clock on the simulator to a February 2013 date and time. Initially, both clocks reset themselves to the current time and date at their next midnight, but after that, they got stuck, never resetting themselves at night again. So, it appears to be a problem with Broken Sand (e.g. a silicon problem). For the morbidly curious, I have documented my efforts here: http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/02/did-nist-break-bunch-of-radio.html - The initial testing http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/03/yes-nist-did-break-bunch-of-radio.html - The testing with the WWVB simulator 73, Clint KA7OEI ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] WWVB Clocks don't sync anymore (revisited)
Funny you bring this up. I am just noticing a sharp clock that I always use and it has been accurate. But it did not flip with the time change this time and though it says its locked its off by 45 seconds slow. Yet a lacross clock across the room seems to be on second wise but never flipped with the time change. As I say its just becoming apparent. Regards Paul WB8TSL On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Clint Turner tur...@ussc.com wrote: A few weeks ago I posted a question/comment about some of my WWVB-based Atomic clocks no longer setting themselves properly. These two clocks, SkyScan #86716, would show the symbol indicating that they had set themselves, but their time was drifting away from UTC. Interestingly, they *would* set themselves exactly once upon installation of the battery, but never again. Since that time, I've done a bit of digging around. The first suspicion was that, perhaps, the NIST had fudged a bit in the WWVB timecode recently, so I manually decoded a few frames and analyzed them: Nothing suspicious there. The next question was if the addition of the BPSK somehow skewed the timing of the TRF's AGC/threshold - but logically, this didn't make sense since the clock *did* set itself exactly ONCE - and it wouldn't have been able to do this at all were this the case. Out of curiosity I poked around on the board and found the trace containing the time code and found that despite the BPSK, its timing was exactly as it should have been: No surprise there. This left the clock itself, so I did what any other Time Nut would do: I built a WWVB simulator. Initially, I set it to a 2010 date - a time that I knew that the clock worked properly. I had two clocks: One that I'd just reset by pulling and replacing the battery while the other had been stuck for a few weeks, not resetting itself nightly as it should. I put both of these in the coupling loops from my WWVB simulator and over the next few days, the recently re-set clock happily synchronized itself while the other one with the 2013 date was still stuck. I then reset that clock and it, too, behaved itself from then on. I then reset the clock on the simulator to a February 2013 date and time. Initially, both clocks reset themselves to the current time and date at their next midnight, but after that, they got stuck, never resetting themselves at night again. So, it appears to be a problem with Broken Sand (e.g. a silicon problem). For the morbidly curious, I have documented my efforts here: http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/**2013/02/did-nist-break-bunch-**of-radio.htmlhttp://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/02/did-nist-break-bunch-of-radio.html- The initial testing http://ka7oei.blogspot.com/**2013/03/yes-nist-did-break-** bunch-of-radio.htmlhttp://ka7oei.blogspot.com/2013/03/yes-nist-did-break-bunch-of-radio.html- The testing with the WWVB simulator 73, Clint KA7OEI __**_ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/** mailman/listinfo/time-nutshttps://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator
Bob, I am a grad student working part time for a frequency generator distributor. For the most part, it's just buy/resell so we don't do production sized testing, rather specific tests when it's too expensive to outsource or we already have the necessary setup. However, we've had quite a few requests for TDEV MTIE analysis, so we started looking into ways to do it in house for the future. I've been seeing a wealth of information on these boards, figured it was worth a shot to ask. It's not a garage operation budget, but the size of the company doesn't permit for more expensive pieces of equipment either (like the symmetricoms that run for 25-30k) I do most of the instrument and test application programming. For stability processing, we use stable32. John ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator
John, Look into getting a cheap pld reference board. Here is one for $39 from Digikey: ICE40HX1K-BLINK-EVN Feed it from your signal generator. Then program a counter that counts down 7362000 steps and outputs a short pulse on underflow thus generating a 1pps pulse. You simply change the counter value to adjust for different device test frequencies. This can be done in about 40 lines of code. Then get a $800 HP 53131A counter to measure the time interval from your DUT to your Rb reference and feed that data into Stable32 to generate TIE plots. This is how we do it here. Cant get much cheaper than that. Bye, Said Sent From iPhone On Mar 19, 2013, at 15:08, John Doering johndoerin...@gmail.com wrote: Bob, I am a grad student working part time for a frequency generator distributor. For the most part, it's just buy/resell so we don't do production sized testing, rather specific tests when it's too expensive to outsource or we already have the necessary setup. However, we've had quite a few requests for TDEV MTIE analysis, so we started looking into ways to do it in house for the future. I've been seeing a wealth of information on these boards, figured it was worth a shot to ask. It's not a garage operation budget, but the size of the company doesn't permit for more expensive pieces of equipment either (like the symmetricoms that run for 25-30k) I do most of the instrument and test application programming. For stability processing, we use stable32. John ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] TIE measurement for arbitrary frequency oscillator
Hi Does your rubidium put out a pps? Do you have any counter capable of time interval (time channel 1 to channel 2) measurement? Something like a 5334 is a pretty common item, and they are cheap if you need to get one. Feed the pps into the start channel. Feed the generator into the stop channel. The time interval measured will distribute over the period of the generator output. At first glance the data will look like junk. You need to post process it to unwrap the delta phase readings. Your data will be once a second and only good to a couple ns. Taking your original frequency, the period would be 135.83… ns. A perfect setup would only report data in the 0 to 135.83 ns range. Real counters are never quite perfect, so you will probably not get 0 and you probably will get 136 or 137 ns. You might also get negative numbers. A lot depends on your counter. The first thing is to fold the data into the proper range. Next is to make a reasonable guess when you go from say 121 ns to 13 ns. That's the phase unwrapping process. Once you've done that, you have a phase record (delta phase once a second) that you can feed into Stable-32. There likely will be a bit more fiddling on real data, but that's the basics. Bob On Mar 19, 2013, at 6:08 PM, John Doering johndoerin...@gmail.com wrote: Bob, I am a grad student working part time for a frequency generator distributor. For the most part, it's just buy/resell so we don't do production sized testing, rather specific tests when it's too expensive to outsource or we already have the necessary setup. However, we've had quite a few requests for TDEV MTIE analysis, so we started looking into ways to do it in house for the future. I've been seeing a wealth of information on these boards, figured it was worth a shot to ask. It's not a garage operation budget, but the size of the company doesn't permit for more expensive pieces of equipment either (like the symmetricoms that run for 25-30k) I do most of the instrument and test application programming. For stability processing, we use stable32. John ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
Just got in. LORAN C had been locked since Paul mentioned the signal. So far it is comparing to my T'Bolt GPS/DO to 8E-13. Stan, W1LE Cape Cod ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] LORAN C still on the air 24 hours SRS 700 looking good
I've got an SRS 700 and I live in CO. Any chance I can pick up the new LORAN signals? Thanks, -Scott On Mar 19, 2013, at 9:33 AM, paul swed paulsw...@gmail.com wrote: ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
