Fellow time-nuts,
It was a great pleasure to meet up with fellow time-nuts Tom Knox, Hank
(didn't get his last name unfortunatly), David Bengtson, Skip Withrow
and John Miles. We had a nice dinner together after the Symmetricom
open-house event. Good folks all over.
The Symmetricom event was very nice. They had a 5071A feeding a
distribution amp they built that then fed two inputs of one of their
TSC5125A. Lovely gear, wish I had one (of each). Sam Stein was hanging
around, got some tricky questions and I got to talk to him a little. I
asked him about that ATAN issue he had written about in one of his
papers, but he gave a good answer in that it wasn't as much the ATAN as
integrating issues after it, which for short intervals gave really bad
values regardless. He realized that maybe the wording didn't came out
right in that part, but ah well. Now I know at least.
During dinner John passed one of his TimePods around and we all got to
see it live. I now got mine from him, and John was kind enough to demo
it on his little portable lab, even if he was sleep depraved and
jet-lagged from his travel. Now I have a TimePod, and wants to play
around more with it... if I only could find the lab in the walking or
driving distance from here... :)
The first day of the conference have been good, folks like David Allan,
Mark Weiss and David Howe has been presenting, among other good
presenters. For most part, the first day have been a rather thorough
walk-through of the basics, even if they had to skip pages in the
presentation. For my own part, it has been more of a repetition coarse
so far, but good to see that it comes together like I suspected it to.
What I take with me as the biggest new thing was really the mechanism
behind flicker noise,
Getting to talk to Dr. Allan is also great, he is a friendly guy. We had
good exchange, and he loved my work on the Allan Deviation article on
Wikipedia. I got a chance to verify some of the points that I feel is
important, such as separation of noise and systematic effects, and that
the definition of the scale shall not be confused with the form of the
estimators (non-overlapping, overlapping, Hadamard, TOTALDEV, Theo etc.)
once bias-corrections have been done. He fully agreed with this, and he
seemed very happy that I paid attention to those details. He was a bit
annoyed with the state of the Modified Allan Deviation article, and I
confessed that I had started it but not fixed errors and completed it.
He seemed impressed by the amounts of hours that must had gone in to
writing it.
I really enjoyed all the presentations, and it feels like a very nice
event overall. I'll report on further developments.
I must also send out many thanks to Tom Knox, who has been a top notch
host to me the last couple of days.
I look forward to go out and visit Hank and his lab.
Now, a shower, breakfast and then day 2 of the NIST Time and Frequency
Seminars.
Cheers,
Magnus
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