On 01/10/11 10:49, Attila Kinali wrote:
On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:46:17 +0000
"Poul-Henning Kamp"<[email protected]> wrote:
In message<CAP6i9MmntLTia=XXUafbyrp+e3=koc1TRSEvL=g05emepq4...@mail.gmail.com>
, brent evers writes:
So at its most basic, I'm wondering what type of clock would make the
most sense to consider - cesium fountain, or hydrogen maser?
Based on what I can gather, a fountain is probably easier to make work
than any of the other, from a pure _mechanical_ point of view.
What makes you think it is easier to build?
From what i gather, the size of a Cs fountain is smaller than of a H maser,
but otherwise the difficulty of the components you need around it is comparable.
A Cs beam can be smaller than a H maser, but a Cs fountain usually
isn't. A particular issue with Cs fountains is that there is a fair bit
of time between the firing of the Cs ball until it comes down again for
observation, so the time between observations becomes quite long. The
fly-wheel oscillator needs to be very stable, so you have a choice
between a very high stability crystal oscillator such as OSA 8607 with
palladium electrodes (only a few ever sold... to the big labs) or a
H-maser.
Not to mention that handling H is a lot easier than handling Cs.
And as i've written before, the electronics for a Cs would be a lot more
difficult to get working than for a H.
Very little of the electronics is at the atomic reference. A typical Cs
or Rb produces 60 or 90 MHz and a suitable mix frequency 12,6 or 5,3 MHz
respectively. That is built very well in through-hole. The signals is
combined onto a coax with a DC bias to hit a SRD sitting inside a RF
cavity. The one Cs beam that deviates from this scheme is the 5071 which
actually has an oscillator running at the Cs frequency, but no pain no
gain as that architecture provides better performance. Still not very
much electronics run at the full frequency.
My scope has a 50 GHz channel and a pair of 20 GHz channels. Badly need
a spectrum analyzer that goes that far and my network analyzer only gets
me to 500 MHz. Luckilly I have some stuff at work. :)
Cheers,
Magnus
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