OK, John Forster and I have been kicking around a few things off line, and he suggested I should bring part of it back on line. Maybe I have a few details wrong, or maybe I have them right and some folks are unaware of them.
My concern about the BPSK, and breaking my Spectracom oscillator, is really centered on loosing my NIST traceable reference oscillator. I don't care one bit what time of day it is. I wrote: >> I did poke around a bit, and it appears that WWVB is still an approved >> frequency standard, so any oscillator which is phased locked to WWVB >> qualifies as an "NIST traceable" standard >> reference oscillator, which is my only concern. John wrote: >Good news! Thanks. I wrote: >> A GPS disciplined oscillator, regardless of how stable/accurate it may be, >> is >> not an NIST traceable standard unless NIST decides to certify the Naval >> Observatory as a standard. Or I suppose NIST could take over the GPS >> correction uploads.but I don't see that happening any time soon. That's >> really outside their mission boundary. Maybe a few things have changed in the metrology world in past few years, but the GPS based oscillators are controlled by the Naval Observatory clocks, not the NIST clocks. So while an HP-117 or a Spectracon 8160 oscillator phase locked to WWVB is "by definition" an NIST traceable standard so long as it is in lock and you have a valid lock history, a GPS unit, even though it may be just as stable an oscillator, isn't an NIST traceable standard without a whole lot of equipment to validate that NIST and the GPS system are in sync. (There is/was actually a commercial solution to verify this, but it isn't/wasn't cheap.) For all you metrology guys out there, has any of this recently changed? So my interest in keep my Spectracom going isn't just to keep a "stable" 10 MHz oscillator in the lab. The GPS will give me a stable signal. My interest is in keeping a "stable and "traceable" 10 MHz signal going. After all, all our old gray-hair tax dollars paid for this government service over the past 5 decades. Why should we get kicked off the bus now? It isn't like we want anything new. Just don't break what we've already paid for. Michael _______________________________________________ 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.
