[time-nuts] Re: ammonia, cesium, masers, etc.

[paul swed]

Well aside from the fact that I have about one piece of gear that goes up
to 23 GHz. A old HP bolometer to a HP 431 meter. Still works from what I
can tell. Really nothing else in the shack. But ebay sure has plenty of
WR42 stuff. Unfortunately at those special ebay prices. So doesn't look too
likely anything can actually be done.
I think from reading if a person had a RF source that could be accurately
set or slightly tuned, in theory a 10 meter length of wr42 with
pressure windows, signal launcher and even a diode detector would actually
see the absorption dip of the ammonia on a power meter. Just thinking. But
the fact is even with a good receiver the cost for an ammonium standard
would be quite high. Far cheaper than the 1960s though.
Regards
Paul.

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 3:23 AM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>
wrote:

> --------
> Bob kb8tq writes:
>
> >I think it’s safe to say that the interaction between the ammonia and
> whatever the
> >structure is made of will be exciting on a number of levels. Corrosion is
> only the first
> >item on a very long list ….
>
> Just stick with a single metal and keep water away, and you should
> be fine, with the footnote that amonia tends to disassociate and
> the hydrogen goes into or through metals.
>
> The simplest solution might be a dielectric-lined waveguide.
>
> That may indeed have been what they did, because those were a
> hot field of research around the same time, largely drive by AT&T
> projection that they would need to install a cross-continental 2"
> wave-guide using carrier frequencies up to 100 GHz to keep up with
> traffic.
>
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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