Cooling Rb's is a much misunderstood discipline. Most Rb's have a specified "base plate temperature range".
For instance the PRS10 specifies -20..+65°C Cooling Rb's should happen only through the base-plate. Cooling other surfaces creates unwanted temperature gradients inside the Rb unit. The colder you run a Rb, the more power it uses to keep important bits inside warm. Running it near the top end of the range wears out the electronics in it faster. No matter what kind of cooling, it is important that it offers sufficient cooling capacity for the internal ovens to have a margin to work with. For frequency stability, you should strive to have a constant baseplate temperature. Putting a fan on anything, will generally speed up and amplify the effects of any ambient temperature changes. For optimal frequency stability, you want to do is mount your Rb on a huge lump of iron which you can keep at a constant temperature around 35-40°C by natural convection. Iron is better than Cu/brass/Al because it conducts heat slower and less eagerly, thus attenuating ambient temperature fluctuations. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ 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.
