Hi

Need to drink my coffee first and type messages second.

The Time is doing a “LSB” change of some sort. It’s not sick, there’s either a 
problem with the string or something like that. The EFC is not moving at an 
alarming rate based on the plot. 

Simple things to do:

Unplug the software and fire up a terminal program. Run it into the Diag port 
just like the other stuff. Set it to 9600 8:N:1 and type the following:

*IDN?

that should give you a string identifying the unit properly and show that 
things are hooked up right.

:SYSTEM:STATUS?

That will show you a mega screen of everything that’s going on.The screen 
includes the time offset and predicted holdover numbers.

:DIAG:ROSC:EFC?

That will show you the EFC voltage in percent of range. It runs over a +/- 100% 
range.

Running things this way for a bit will let you eliminate any software issues 
from the mix. If things still look odd, do a:

:DIAG:LOG:READ:ALL?

That will show you any alarm outputs or odd things going thump in the night.

Bob


> On Nov 14, 2014, at 7:13 AM, ed briggs <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> The EFC is probably not sick, it is still in the middle of it's range, and 
> has moved only a small amount.  I would let it run for another week and see 
> if it starts to head back down.   As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to 
> run my z3816a for several weeks before it settled down.  After that period of 
> time, my Z3816 settled into the EFC range of 581240-581280 and a predicted 
> uncertainty in the 100-200ns/24 range - but it took a month to get there)
> 
> Important note: it seems that the Lucent *reports the PPS TI error 
> differently* than previous units. This will make comparisons between this 
> unit and the older unit difficult.   
> 
> Another time-nut sent me the data file from Z38xx attached to a Lucent GPSDO, 
> and I noticed that most of the values TI values had only zeros to the right 
> of the decimal point.  (almost all but not all).  This made the data look 
> like the TI jumped around in discrete steps of 1.0 * 10e-8 .  That is the 
> reason you see the 'strata' and 'plateaus' in your plot that you don't see in 
> previous z3801,3805,3816 plots.  The peaks in the +/- 40 ns range are the 
> same as on my Z3816a (which uses the same GPS receiver).
> 
> The data file also had quite a few 0.000000000 TI values, which bounced then 
> to 1.0e-8 etc.  So somewhere in the data paths, someone is doing the 
> equivalent of a floor(TI error). So if you calculate averages on this kind of 
> data and compare it to averages or SD on previous units, the results will be 
> misleading.
> 
> It's possible that the program Z38xx is incorrectly parsing these values and 
> 'stripping the digits to the right' performing a floor(TI).   I can't tell 
> because I only have the data after Z38xx parsed it.  Somebody who has one of 
> these units and Z38xx could open the debug screen and capture it to a file 
> and see if the '1 PPS to TI ns relative to GPS" has zeros to the right of the 
> decimal point most of the time, or the response to the :PTIM:TINT? is 
> 'stepping' as I described above.
> 
> BTW - what do you see as the predicted uncertainty.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Ed
>                                         
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