The math I am familiar with, seems to have mostly developed around master-slave arrangements associated with radar pulses and (as you point out) TV. In the MIT Rad Lab series there are some single-purpose treatments but a good summary is Millman & Taub, "Pulse and Digital Circuits". Their approach is largely graphical but in several cases (especially relaxation oscillator coupled to a pulse or sine-wave circuit) they have analytic results. They also treat sine wave oscillators, getting all the way to phase detectors driving integrators driving reactance tubes (I think we would call this a true PLL today).
The relaxation oscillators with single polarity sync pulse driving the active device into conduction early, yes, you can only speed them up. But if you look at the Millman and Taub math you can also see that a sync pulse of the other polarity can actually slow them down. But I don't think the relaxation oscillator treatment describes the metronome. They get one (or two?) kicks a cycle from the spring mechanism, but the strength of the kick does not set their period, the harmonic oscillator (sine wave) pendulum behavior dominates their period, and I think (since the table sways both left and right) they can be slowed down or sped up through coupling Tim. On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:13 PM, Bill Hawkins <b...@iaxs.net> wrote: > Maybe not. We need the math that describes the phenomenon, but it > won't come from me. > > Consider the way that television sync pulses synchronized the sweep > oscillators. The pulse has to get there before the oscillator cycles > on its own. Similarly, the movement of the common base has to occur > before a metronome clicks by itself. > > The devices synchronize to the fastest metronome, or they can't all > synchronize. > > Bill Hawkins > > > -----Original Message----- > From: David McGaw > Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 7:11 PM > > Compromise. > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to > https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.