Hello Time-Nuts, I recently acquired an HP 5065A rubidium oscillator (with 10811 10MHz OCXO). I think I pretty much have it running now and have been letting it cook for the last couple of weeks. I offset the C-field + and - and measured the frequency to calculate the C-field sensitivity. My unit came out to 1.96x10E-12 per dial unit, which agrees with the manual stated 2x10E-12. So, calculated the on frequency C-field value and dialed it in.
Attached is a Lady Heather plot of the frequency over the last 3 days. The purple line is the 1pps plot with the vertical scale being 20ns per division. So, the unit is off about 125ns over the last 72 hours (running about 4.92x10E-13 slow). So my C-field setting is off about 1/4 of a division, but I think I'm going to leave well enough alone. The yellow line is the NTBW50AA temperature sensor, and you can clearly see when the furnace cycles. I was away for the weekend, and you can also clearly see when I came home this evening and turned up the heat. At the very end of the plot is the spike when I turned on the lights in the shop. I love using a Thunderbolt/NTBW50AA for making frequency measurements this way. I remove the OCXO, and insert the 10MHz from the DUT. Then disable disciplining so the DAC voltage doesn't try to chase the open loop oscillator. Of course the short-term performance looks worse than it actually is because of measuring against GPS, but the long-term measurements are very good. I want to log this unit at regular intervals to see what the aging looks like. Also need to do some measurements against the cesium to see what the short-term performance might be. But, I think this oscillator will be a good reference in many cases in lieu of using the cesium. Regards, Skip Withrow
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