Henry Hallam wrote:
Timing newbie here, so please educate me - why does aging matter? Isn't the whole purpose of a GPSDO to completely eliminate long-term drift?
First degree effect yes, but depending on how you do it, more or less of the drift remains uncompensated. If you just try to do frequency compensation, drift is uncompensated and a second-degree PI-regulator will have a phase shift in its chase of frequency and also then a frequency error (it compensates the frequency it had a while ago).
Linear drift compensation (such as PII²-regulator) would work better, if only the oscillator had true linear drift... which they don't.
Various elaborate algorithms exists to handle both tempco and drift (both important in hold-over operation), the Thunderbolt is not doing too advanced tricks. A low-drifter would certainly help, but to be meaningful tempco also needs to be considered.
Cheers, Magnus _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
