[time-nuts] Time-nut gettogether in Boulder

[Magnus Danielson]

Fellow time-nuts,

It was a great pleasure to meet up with fellow time-nuts Tom Knox, Hank 
(didn't get his last name unfortunatly), David Bengtson, Skip Withrow 
and John Miles. We had a nice dinner together after the Symmetricom 
open-house event. Good folks all over.

The Symmetricom event was very nice. They had a 5071A feeding a 
distribution amp they built that then fed two inputs of one of their 
TSC5125A. Lovely gear, wish I had one (of each). Sam Stein was hanging 
around, got some tricky questions and I got to talk to him a little. I 
asked him about that ATAN issue he had written about in one of his 
papers, but he gave a good answer in that it wasn't as much the ATAN as 
integrating issues after it, which for short intervals gave really bad 
values regardless. He realized that maybe the wording didn't came out 
right in that part, but ah well. Now I know at least.

During dinner John passed one of his TimePods around and we all got to 
see it live. I now got mine from him, and John was kind enough to demo 
it on his little portable lab, even if he was sleep depraved and 
jet-lagged from his travel. Now I have a TimePod, and wants to play 
around more with it... if I only could find the lab in the walking or 
driving distance from here... :)

The first day of the conference have been good, folks like David Allan, 
Mark Weiss and David Howe has been presenting, among other good 
presenters. For most part, the first day have been a rather thorough 
walk-through of the basics, even if they had to skip pages in the 
presentation. For my own part, it has been more of a repetition coarse 
so far, but good to see that it comes together like I suspected it to. 
What I take with me as the biggest new thing was really the mechanism 
behind flicker noise,

Getting to talk to Dr. Allan is also great, he is a friendly guy. We had 
good exchange, and he loved my work on the Allan Deviation article on 
Wikipedia. I got a chance to verify some of the points that I feel is 
important, such as separation of noise and systematic effects, and that 
the definition of the scale shall not be confused with the form of the 
estimators (non-overlapping, overlapping, Hadamard, TOTALDEV, Theo etc.) 
once bias-corrections have been done. He fully agreed with this, and he 
seemed very happy that I paid attention to those details. He was a bit 
annoyed with the state of the Modified Allan Deviation article, and I 
confessed that I had started it but not fixed errors and completed it. 
He seemed impressed by the amounts of hours that must had gone in to 
writing it.

I really enjoyed all the presentations, and it feels like a very nice 
event overall. I'll report on further developments.

I must also send out many thanks to Tom Knox, who has been a top notch 
host to me the last couple of days.

I look forward to go out and visit Hank and his lab.

Now, a shower, breakfast and then day 2 of the NIST Time and Frequency 
Seminars.

Cheers,
Magnus