Hi In general, eBay is your friend for stable crystal oscillators at a “friendly” price. Even if you buy 10 to get one, the price is still pretty good. What you learn testing them is indeed “Time Nut Stuff”.
Just what’s a good deal varies almost week to week. It is very much a shop shop shop sort of thing. Best / quickest / easiest way to use all these gizmos: Program up a PIC to divide them to 1 pps and go from there. Bob > On Jan 5, 2022, at 6:01 PM, Adam Space <[email protected]> wrote: > > My question is rather open ended. I'm relatively new to timing and whatnot. > So far I have mainly dabbled in NTP, and some GPS stuff with a Raspberry Pi > with a GPS hat. But both of these are limited to timekeeping on an actual > computer system, but I'd like to get into some of the more hardware stuff, > and I figured a crystal oscillator would be a good place to start. > > My knowledge of hardware is pretty weak, so I am unsure of how stuff works > in this realm. For example, a quick google search shows very cheap crystal > oscillators, like these > <https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/cts-frequency-controls/MXO45-3C-10M000000/1801887>. > But I am confused on how I could exactly use this. One thing I like about > NTP is that I can see and compare different clocks, and synchronize them > to time-scales like UTC, and track their performance over time. But if I > have a crystal oscillator going, how could I compare it or adjust it to > other clocks on my network, or to UTC for example? > > Or to take another example, suppose I have a few crystal oscillators like > the one above. Is there a way I could compare them to each other, or log > the offsets from each other, and so on? Ultimately, it would be nice to > compare the frequency and time offsets to a reference source that is > accurate long-term, like my GPS hat Raspberry Pi. > > Any ideas, suggestions, or clarifications are welcome. Additionally, if > anyone knows of any guides (either text, video, or whatever), that would be > great too. > > Adam > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] -- To unsubscribe send an > email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] -- To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to and follow the instructions there.
