On 11/03/2016 06:10 PM, Attila Kinali wrote:
On Thu, 3 Nov 2016 16:37:06 -0400
Ruslan Nabioullin <[email protected]> wrote:
What about instead establishing an open-source hardware project for a
frequency standard fusor? I was researching COTS solutions for this for
my rubidium ensemble and could only find this one product, which
obviously should be exorbitant in cost:
You don't need a hardware project for this, as long as a paper clock
is enough for you. Just buy a couple of kiwi-sdr (or anything similar),
provide all of them with a common clock source and you get a comparison
of all your atomic clocks with minimum effort and can build from that
a paper clock easily. The paper clock can than be used for the measurement
you do, using one of the atomic clocks (preferably the one with the lowest
phase noise) as reference.
If it's so relatively straightforward, then why not establish such a
project instead of reinventing the wheel by attempting to perform atomic
standard R&D and fabrication on a shoestring? It should be much more
practical, even considering the fact that one will obtain diminishing
returns on the ensemble's n, and furthermore should be extremely
successful---apparently only a single Russian company holds a global
monopoly on this product, apart from custom-fabricated setups in
national metrology labs, and numerous people would benefit (why purchase
an exorbitantly-expensive and short-lifespan cesium standard when one
can fuse a redundant ensemble of rubidium standards? Or for
lower-budget and/or higher-MTBF setups, the same for a rubidium standard
and OCXO standards, resp.)
Another project, much simpler in comparison but even more useful, would
be a rack-mount standard for an OCXO or rubidium physics package, which
should consist of just a chassis, power supply, thermal structure, and a
monitoring subsystem with interfaces (LEDs, an LCD display, and
RS-232/USB/GPIB/Ethernet). The used market is flooded with cheap
physics packages, yet actual standards are uncommon and expensive.
-Ruslan
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