[time-nuts] 20th year of time nuts mailing list

[Magnus Danielson]

Fellow time-nuts,

In the end of the previous millennia I got involved in a handful of
email-lists pertaining to analog (musical) synthesizer and building of
these. I then ended up with the opportunity of buying some test-gear to
aid my endeavors on trimming the oscillators. It's a bit of a challenge,
since you have an exponential converter that transforms a 1 V/Oct
voltage over to a current linear with frequency, using NP-junction
properties. Then this current is used convert into a sawtooth or
triangular shape using a capacitor and a reset circuit, of which the
later has a fixed reset-time. A good expo-converter can span over 20
octaves. Trimming this to "track properly" and be temperature stable is
a challenge. So, I was able to acquire a pair of bench DMMs in form of
HP 3457A, a frequency counter in form of HP5335A and a R&S XSRM Rubidium
reference out of Ericsson as they closed one of their factories and also
calibration labs. Great. I also got a HP4195A network analyzer and
HP3325B function generator. Not a bad setup. However, I wanted to learn
more about oscillators. I was searching the net using AltaVista, found
the NIST T&F archive, I found variour other sources, learned that there
is a stability measure called Allan Deviation and phase-noise, and
started to read up a lot. I then also found this little quirky
email-list for people that really like time and frequency and being kind
of nuts, called time-nuts. You might have heard about them. I ended up
learning a lot quickly. In parallel at work I was working with jitter in
digital transmission and how that cause bit errors, synchronization and
how to build synchronization over the full network. I ended up joining
the IEEE UFFC, as this allowed me to get access to that library of articles.

Over time I have seen my lab outgrow the room it started in, I now lost
count of the number of rubidiums I have, I barely know how many cesiums
I have and the once unobtainium of a hydrogen maser obviously takes a
big part of the new lab and is fortunately easy to count so far (1).
Counter-wise I also got a rather sizeable collection, some of which I
have more for museum/reference purposes than anything I can meaningful
use. I can measure ADEV and phase-noise fairly well, to the level that I
was appaulled by the huge 10 ps spikes that the RS232 readout was
causing, and here I thought 10 ps resolution was unobtainable not that
far ago. I have presented at EFTF and IFCS, have a PTTI presentation to
finalize now. I know a whole range of the people behind the names of the
articles I read.

Over the years I learned a lot just hanging out on the list, and I have
hopefully contributed some. It's been an awesome journey. There is still
things to learn, and just reading the list is a great way to learn
things. Also at times, I find myself reminded rather than learning, but
that is important too.

Cheers,
Magnus

On 2021-01-01 06:02, Tom Van Baak wrote:
> Hello time nuts,
>
> Ah, it is 2021-01-01 (JD 2459215.5, MJD 59215) which is nice because
> that means it's not 2020 anymore.
>
> One reason I've been looking forward to 2021 is that it's now
> officially the 20th year of the time nuts mailing list. So this is a
> note to say *thank you* to everyone for making it so amazing over the
> years. I get comments all the time about this mailing list; its depth,
> its high SNR, its focus, its vast archive of quality postings, and
> especially, the community that evolved around the list.
>
> On the web the phrase "time nut" is now a proper noun, sometimes an
> adjective, or occasionally a diagnosis or disease. Never in my wildest
> dreams did I think any of this would happen. I thought my early
> interest in nixie tubes, clocks, electronics, and precise timing might
> be a passing phase, and that the frequency of eBay purchases would
> fade. But no. This turns out to be an incredibly wide, deep,
> interesting, and rewarding hobby. The mailing list started with 6
> people (half of whom are still active) and we now have 1850 members. [1]
>
> Speaking of history, and also to put time-nuts into perspective, I'd
> like to mention that leapsecond.com (tvb) and febo.com (jra) predate
> Y2K (2000), wikipedia (2001), facebook (2004), youtube (2005), twitter
> (2006), reddit (2006), iPhone (2007), duckduckgo (2008), gmail (2004,
> 2009), eevblog (2009), instagram (2010), snapchat (2011), outlook
> (2012), and literally millions of other web sites and mailing lists.
>
> When this all started for us it was WWV on short-wave, ACTS by phone,
> Loran-C, GOES, WWVB, GPS, Win98, dial-up, and my search engine was
> altavista.dec.com. It's scary to think how much has changed in 20
> years. Fun fact: I started leapsecond.com so I could post the results
> of a Y2K Colorado visit to NIST. If the world was going to crash I was
> going to be at ground zero, with a camera. [2]
>
> Anyway, stay safe, stay healthy, stay timely. Here's to a new decade
> and a happy new year to all of us.
>
> /tvb
>
> [1] http://leapsecond.com/time-nuts.htm#history
>
> [2] http://leapsecond.com/y2k/
>
>
>
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