[time-nuts] Reliability of atomic clocks
Alan Melia
alan.melia at btinternet.com
Sun Mar 27 14:52:00 UTC 2016
Hi Attila, I am out of the business now, well retired, so my opinion carries
little weight,
:-)) but for whatever it does, my thought is that MTBF is a pretty useless
parameter in general. This is a relatively low volume unit manufactured by a
variety of different firms with each their opinion on the best optimum.
The statistical base to MTBF is faulty and in my opinion its only use is to
indicate where a design might be improved by changing the component mix. The
actual value that falls out of the end of the calculation for a desgn is
completely meaningless, but the non-tech bean-counters wanted a way to
justify more expensive designs, and the purchase of expensive kit.
I would doubt that anyone collected the data on completed units, though
there may have been spec values quoted. I guess in this usage area most used
expected them to fail and guarded against it by duplication, the exception
may be the space environment but I have no experience there.
Good Luck with it
Alan
G3NYK
----- Original Message -----
From: "Attila Kinali" <attila at kinali.ch>
To: <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2016 12:53 PM
Subject: [time-nuts] Reliability of atomic clocks
> Moin,
>
> Maybe someone here can help me.
> I am looking for data on the reliability of atomic clocks.
> I.e. how often and, if possible, how they fail.
>
> Unfortunately, if I google for reliability then all that pops up
> are descriptions of the accuracy and stability of atomic clocks.
> If I go for MTBF I only get two papers from the 70s that tackle
> the problem in general, without giving any data.
>
> Does someone know where I could find current data about MTBF and
> failure modes of atomic clocks? Given the number of 5071's installed
> in labs, there must be at least some data on them....
>
>
> Attila Kinali
>
> --
> Reading can seriously damage your ignorance.
> -- unknown
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