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

[Julien Goodwin]

On 1/1/21 4:02 pm, 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]

Having just caught up on almost 2 years of backlog, I just want to
reinforce what an incredible community this list is.

My day job and various other events through 2020 (somehow the pandemic
was the least of all) have meant I've done almost no time stuff since
mid-2019.

The one exception being trying out a comparison of my house rubidium (my
old apartment didn't have a usable sky view for GPS) vs the frequency
output of a LeoNTP, amazingly, despite the rubidium (an ancient Efratom
FRK) being over 20 years out of cal, the two agree past 9 digits on an
SRS SR620, one used as reference, the other input, was just the quickest
way to get a rough idea.